It looks like Tesla is going to face a new competitor in the luxury electric car market soon: an upcoming startup called Faraday Future. Located in Gardena, California, the carmaker has a pretty mysterious origin, popping up out of nowhere at all.
The electric car startup intends to build a $1 billion factory somewhere in Nevada, California, Louisiana or Georgia, planning on rolling out vehicles sometime in 2017. With 400 employees on board and an additional 10 more every week, it seems to be going all out to take the top spot in the industry, not to mention that it's hiring people who worked for Tesla.
"We are very excited to make our $1 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing—and this is just phase one. Selecting the right location for the future FF manufacturing facility is critical to our overall goals. Producing our forward-looking and fully-connected electric vehicles not only requires the latest technology, but the right community partner," Nick Sampson, Faraday Future's senior VP and former Tesla engineer, says in a news release.
To add more to the mystery, Faraday Future declined to divulge where the $1 billion funding came from when Wall Street Journal asked the future carmaker, where Sampson simply replied that it is keeping its "partners confidential."
Based on where its employees are coming from, some people have speculated that Faraday Future is Apple.
"They have hired people we've fired. We always jokingly call Apple the 'Tesla Graveyard'. If you don't make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple," Musk tells Handelsblatt, a German business newspaper.
On top of that, the Cupertino brand has been looking into penetrating the auto industry for a while now with its Apple Car, so it's probably not too crazy to think that the speculations are true.
Faraday Future aims to be Tesla's rival in the future, and with so many secrets involved, it won't be surprising to see the electric car dishing out Apple Cars in 2017.
