Faraday Future started out with bold promises. It would produce a luxury electric crossover in Nevada by 2017 in a $1 billion factory. Things got complicated, and the factory is no more. What stood still was the car project, and Faraday Future is now trying to make it reach customers’ hands. Geely will be instrumental in that: apart from making the car in China, it also took a minority stake in Faraday Future. With manufacturing settled, it is time to fix its reputation with public presentations of the FF 91. Faraday Future is now making a 2,270 road trip with the EV, from Chicago to Los Angeles.
The company is now releasing videos of each of the legs of this trip. The first one was from Chicago to Saint Louis. The second was from Saint Louis to Springfield. There are six more legs predicted, each apparently corresponding to range limits for the FF 91 (around 300 miles). The weird thing is that it would have the largest battery pack for a passenger vehicle so far: 130 kWh. Faraday Future once said it would allow the FF 91 to travel 378 miles (608 kilometers).
With that in mind, the promotional road trip seems to have missed a great opportunity. Faraday Future could show how far this vehicle travels with its 103 kWh battery pack instead of stopping so many times. It could show how fast it charges going coast to coast in the least amount of time possible. In other words, it could have tried to do what Lucid did with Motor Trend on a larger scale – and it would still not look as good as that competitor.
If you don’t know what we’re talking about, you should check our article about that. Now we know that Jonny Lieberman got to drive an Air Dream Edition Range for 445 miles on a single charge. He still had 30 miles left when he arrived, which suggests it could travel for 475 miles. Peter Rawlinson drove another one for the same distance and reached its destination with 72 miles left. That amounts to 517 miles, the precise range Lucid estimates EPA will certify that the Air has.
With 130 kWh, the FF 91 should travel a lot further. It is 206.7 inches (5.25 meters) long, 89.9 in (2.28 m) wide, 62.9 in (1.60 m) tall, and has a wheelbase of 126 in (3.20 m). It is longer, wider, taller, and consequently heavier than Lucid’s sedan, but its energy efficiency does not seem to stand out. In that sense, perhaps Faraday Future carefully planned the short legs. With 11 months until deliveries of the first units start, there's not much time to make it a more efficient machine.
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