Faraday Future wants you to forget what you may have heard the past few weeks.
Forget about the reported financial troubles of the upstart electric car company and its major investor, Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting. Forget that the maker of odd Batmobile-looking concepts founded by former Tesla employees has put building its new Nevada factory on hold for a second time. Forget that a state official once referred to the company as a “Ponzi scheme.“
Forget all that and instead, think about BMW. All those decades of German engineering and luxury gravitas. Hey, now look: it’s a BMW dude on Faraday Future’s website!
This seems to be the response Faraday Future hopes it will get from its announcement on Monday that it has hired veteran auto industry exec Ulrich Kranz away from BMW’s electric vehicle division. Kranz becomes the startup’s new Chief Technology Officer after three decades working in the world of establishment automakers.
You can put your eyebrow down now.
“I wanted to be at a company that is really 100 percent focused on the future and not just introducing another electric vehicle,” Kranz said. “When I saw what the team had already done, I was deeply impressed.”
Kranz concedes he will be brand new to the startup world:
“This is the first time that I’m in a startup atmosphere. As far as I know, the decision-making process is much quicker. People are also willing to take some risks, and they work on new, virtual tools to get things out in a much quicker way. This is what I saw when I visited the first time: highly motivated people.”
But the idea clearly is not to bring in Kranz to serve as a credentialed entrepreneurial anthropologist making keen observations about this foreign, more nimble operating environment. Instead, Faraday Future is looking to install a vet with decades of experience actually bringing practical, non-Batmobile-looking cars to market.
“The short-term goal is to get FF 91 on the road. We will stress this goal 100 times every day,” Kranz said.
FF 91 is Faraday Future’s debut model, a hyper-connected EV with some of the autonomous capabilities currently found in Teslas. The sedan’s prototype performed admirably against Tesla’s Model S P100D, going from zero to 60 mph a fraction of a second faster.
But Kranz and Faraday Future should be concerned not only with acceleration, but also execution at this point. Specifically, the team really needs to accelerate its execution of the FF 91’s roll-out. Finishing a factory to deliver on its $5,000 reserve orders would be a good start.
After all, being faster is great, but when your competition has a mile-long head-start (and a lot more capital) it can be damn near impossible to catch up.
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