Wooooo-wee, we got ourselves a good ole fashioned electric car start-up fight! Exciting! This week, electric and autonomous vehicle start-up NIO unveiled a concept car at the SXSW bonanza. Looks like a fine machine. However, potential rival-pending-if-either-ever-makes-a-production-vehicle Faraday Future doesn’t seem to like it.
That’s because, according to Faraday’s senior vice president of research & development and engineering, Nick Sampson, it looks just like the California start-up’s “flagship” production vehicle, the battlecruiser-named FF 91.
Sampson’s tweet linked to a photo (seen in the topshot above) to compare the front and side of both the FF 91 and NIO’s concept. He seems pretty pissed! And Sampson doubled down when Electrek’s editor-in-chief Fred Lambert pressed him on the allegation.
Frankly, we’re a bit surprised the design of the FF 91 was apparently settled more than a year ago, given that was around the time of the company’s first not-so-pretty stop at CES. But NIO and FF have ways to go to prove they’re legit—especially with NIO claiming the concept will bring its electric vehicle to the U.S. market by 2020 with, according to The Verge, an improbable 600 mile range.
A NIO spokesperson declined to comment directly on Sampson’s claims, but said in an email that the company’s focus is on “our customers and delivering a beautiful, real electric vehicle in China in 2018 and an electric, autonomous vehicle in the US in 2020.”
But yeah, fight on, you two. It’s a great look.