Some of you would like to know whether everything you hear about the Faraday Future FF 91 is real or not. In fact, opinions on the feasibility of the FF 91 are mixed. There's no question that the automaker's message team is relentlessly positive, but that's often a sure sign that you should put on your skeptical spectacles and take a closer look. There are still the side mirrors – or, actually, the side cameras. Hugely popular with the concept car set, side cameras are still not approved in the U.S. for production vehicles, so that's at least one thing that FF will have to change before bringing the FF 91 to market. Either that or get the law changed.
FF has a mounting pile of problems, from the departure of executives to the failure of the FF 91 to park itself during a live demonstration at the CES reveal event. While the company did succeed in an unverified time trial between the FF 91 and a Bentley Bentayga, a Ferrari 488 GTB, and a Tesla Model X during the launch event, that's not enough to cancel out the technical failure on stage. FF needs to keep the good news items coming, because the biggest real-world problem the company faces is the slow progress of its Nevada factory. Sure, senior vice president of R&D and engineering Nick Sampson said that FF is ready to start "phase two" there (without explaining what that means, exactly), but there's still not much to see as of early January 2017. This is not the kind of progress you want to see if you're going to begin building production cars in 2018.
And those production cars will, if they are to be anything like the "production" FF 91 Faraday showed on stage, come with a lot of untested tech. Touch sensitive panels on the B-pillar, a rising lidar sensor that comes up out of the hood, and four (!) different cell modems from the four major carriers that are supposed to keep the car connected at all times, no matter where you are. No one else has tried to pack all of these things into a vehicle at once. We're not saying it's impossible that FF gets all of this right on the first try, but unlikely is a fair word to use here.
