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Faraday Gets Rescue Loan, Finds New Home

They went from a billion-dollar facility in Vegas to this 55-year-old factory that has been mostly vacant since 2001.

Faraday Future has found a new home. Yesterday, the electric car company announced that it had signed a lease on its new manufacturing facility. On Saturday, more than 300 Faraday employees and supporters drove from Los Angeles to Hanford in Northern California, more than 200 miles from the company's headquarters to start cleaning up the site. They started by tagging it.

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Faraday recently received a $14 million "rescue loan" that helped cover part of the lease for the new factory. Apparently, the company offered its headquarters in Los Angeles as collateral.

Last month, the once hot startup abandoned plans to build a billion-dollar manufacturing facility near Las Vegas. They had already invested $120 million in the site. The company still plans to deliver the FF 91, its first production vehicle, by the end of 2018.

According to The Verge, the new home is a 55-year-old former Pirelli factory that has been mostly empty since 2001. Faraday plans to continue prepping the site, including planning, refurbishing, and permitting. But, according to the release, the current tenants don’t move out until late November, though the company expects to ramp-up the site in early 2018.

The new manufacturing facility is 1M sq. ft., which is bigger than most recent plans in Nevada. Initially, Faraday targeted a 3 million square-foot facility. That was scaled back to plans for a 650,000 sq-ft “mini” plant before the project was abandoned altogether. Over time, the new factory will have up to 1,300 employees working over 3 shifts.

This is IEN Now with David Mantey. 

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