It’s been said that there is no innovation without failure, which may be the truest phrase ever uttered as it relates to the electrical vehicle market – with emphasis on the failure part.
Not that I don’t think this has legs, it’s just a super easy target right now… because Tesla’s rival-in-the-making Faraday Future has started to hit some snags. You may recall, this secretive Chinese-backed company is building a behemoth of a factory for producing fancy electric sports cars in North Las Vegas as we speak. The development was courted by several states, but Nevada won out and in December of 2015, state legislature granted Faraday a $335-million incentive package, including $215 million in tax breaks.
But since then, Nevada’s treasurer Dan Schwartz has been publicly quite wary about the transparency of Faraday Future’s finances – namely, how the company could cover any failures so Nevada’s taxpayers aren’t stuck holding the bag for infrastructure costs and incentives, should the company go belly up mid-development.
Unfortunately, the latest revelation about Faraday Future certainly won’t be putting Treasurer Schwartz’s mind at ease. Automotive News first reported that in an Oct. 10 letter to Faraday, it was revealed that Faraday hasn’t paid $21 million due to the engineering firm Aecom, who is serving as the prime contractor for the construction project, for the month of September. In fact, says the LA Times, Aecom warned that work on the site could be halted if it doesn’t get its money, probably because the end of October comes with its own $25 million bill for additional work. The industry is abuzz as they wait to hear some sort of confirmation from Faraday that there is no problem, and the money is coming – so far, none of that has occurred.
If only Elon Musk could be gleefully celebrating...
Despite the troubles facing his soon-to-be-bitter-rival, Tesla has been the subject of another embarrassing account, this time from Consumer Reports, who published its annual car brand reliability rankings and placed Tesla squarely in the bottom five.
