Remember Faraday Future? We rode in its new EV, and it wasn’t great
Enlarge / Back in 2015, Faraday Future looked like it could be a proper rival for Tesla. In 2022, we're still waiting for its first EV, the FF91, to be ready for prime time. (credit: Faraday / Aurich Lawson)
PEBBLE BEACH, CALIF.-In a parking lot next to Peter Hay Hill sat two square-ish, blobby vehicles. They weren't attractive, and they seemed both inordinately squat and huge, but there were plenty of looky-loos who wanted to check them out. One vehicle was a static "show car," and when a man in pink pants and a polo shirt with a popped collar tried to find a way to open a door, a product specialist flapped him away. Truthfully, even if you could figure out a way to open the doors, there weren't any handles to grab.
Plenty of people milled down the hill from where the more established automakers had taken up residence to stop and gawk at the pair of FF91 pre-production vehicles, one giving rides around the block in Pebble Beach traffic-mixing with Koeniseggs, McLarens, and Ferraris-and the other hulking across two parking spots, with the doors on the passenger side open to passers-by.
The weirdly shaped vehicle stood out in a sea of low-slung supercars crawling all over the bucolic, fog-shrouded Pebble Beach peninsula. The color of both the display and test vehicles was white, so they looked like refrigerators in a sea of praying mantises. I waited while another journalist took a ride around the block in the mobile pre-production FF91, the first and only vehicle from beleaguered California startup Faraday Future.