You may have never heard of the company Faraday Future, but some of the minds behind it come from household names such as BMW, Tesla and General Motors.
The California-based electric car startup announced that it is preparing its own electric car to launch in 2017 and it will drop a whopping $1 billion on a manufacturing plant in the United States.
"Producing our forward-looking and fully-connected electric vehicles not only requires the latest technology, but the right community partner," Faraday SVP Nick Sampson said in the company's press release, as reported by The Verge.
Faraday Future will reportedly decide between California, Georgia, Louisiana and Nevada as the state to house its state-of-the-art automotive plant.
Having launched just 18 months ago via private funding, the company already counts more than 400 employees, according to the Wall Street Journal. In addition, Faraday has extracted big-name talent from the likes of Tesla, BMW, GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler — including Richard Kim, who spearheaded the design of the BMW i8 and i3 concepts and Pontus Fontaeus, who has designed interiors for the likes of Ferrari, Land Rover and Volvo.
"This is the job I've been training for my whole life," Fontaeus told Dujour. "There are some designers who need a brief, a foothold. And then there are designers like these who have a pioneer spirit and don't need a safety net. We're actually better when we can create from nothing."
As part of the company's release, Faraday said: "In addition to producing vehicles, [it] plans to explore other aspects of the automotive and technology industries, including unique ownership and usage models, in-vehicle content and autonomous driving."
That being said, prepping for the launch of an electric car and having minds who formerly worked at Tesla only bode well for the mysterious startup. Let's see how quickly it can build a name for itself and make a dent in the sometimes hard-to-crack auto industry.
