Gadgetory

Tesla is getting most of the attention in the electric car world but here's a mysterious California company that keeps making big hires from BMW and even Tesla itself and has quietly built a staff of over 400 people I had a chance to tour Faraday futures Southern California headquarters before they come out of stealth mode and to talk to the company's top engineer and designer Nick Sampson is the senior vice president of Faraday future and is one of the company's founders leading engineering so the first discussion started eighteen months ago eighteen months ago we've gotta have car that perhaps can just turn up when you need it you could don't have to own it you can just pull it up on your phone or you can free book it or it will just know that you need it because you're scheduled to go somewhere we wanted to not just be an automotive company so we reached out into the aerospace industries into medical device industries into the Internet technology industry to pull together a group of people with a diverse range of skills Nick's or woody what do you bring to the equation as far as your background you're an engineer by training uh engineer by training but also bring more than engineering I also studied economics and business so I understand both sides of things and Tesla for instance we did a completely different sales model rather than the traditional dealership model we used a model where we sold via the internet sold via stores sold in places that people had more access to rather than the sort of rather remote so is Faraday going to have a similar spirit of Tesla or how is it going to be different it's going to be different in that we're creating an environment that's even more creative many people look at Tesla and think of that they've done it differently to a traditional auto industry which they have but there's there's other other ways even more different imagine the future and the environment you want to be in and the products and the world that you want to create and then work out how would I get to that place if I go on a road trip now the weekend that I have to plan that in in indoors on a computer and then I have to go to the car and we put that in I have to sort of mess about I can't it's not seamless it's not a world where the car knows me knows my needs now if I could if I planned something on one device why shouldn't that be available another device if I plan my journey I should get in the car the car should know my journey or should know some of the places I want to visit on the way because it knows my preferences or even suggest places it might say well we're going on this journey to here would you like to stop at this restaurant rather than we have to do even bother to go on and say can you find me a restaurant the car should begin to let me learn my desires have learned what I what I like where I want to go or even not of me the owner or the user of the car it should the other people that are with me and I can see a time through envisioning your car that's much smarter than anything we've got today so if we went on a journey together it should know mymusictaste because it knows who I am and it's read my playlists and it should know who you are and the car sure to say I'm gonna start playing these tracks because I found a commonality there you both should like this John and music you should also know other things about everybody that's connected with the car well there'd be a car with a single owner or do you see it as no very much we see that yes there will be cars that still have single owners but in the future with their beer we have vast number of people who don't want to own a car anymore we might instead of sort of having own owning a car it might be a subscription does that make you want to make something that could race that could be have a performance I guess I'm always gonna have that desire that's right but when you start a company you can do that right like you can say why don't we try this yeah there there's there's the opportunity to instead of it being a great thing to get a lot of people around in an efficient manner we just had that just for one person to go and have fun so from an engineering point does that mean you start with one car and you build out from that or do you introduce ten different shapes and that people choose which one they want or how does that work our longer-term vision is that we're gonna have to develop a completely different range of vehicles for the future and where's your company in that we're moving remarkably quickly we've already got a test vehicle out running testing electrical system here in California and we're already well through the design process for production we already are releasing data and information to start having parts made for real vehicles in the future so it is an American car company you know you're trying to live yet the company is was founded here in California and we're going to be manufacturing in the USA thinking about you know really being in the West Coast now this is we have Apple that might be coming into the car where the Google new companies that are really no longer traditional automotive companies so do you see those companies as like-minded competitors not like-minded competitors I just find them considering as like-minded allies to me it's a great thing that some of those other companies are coming into the industry it's not a threat more that people that join the more consumers will realize the opportunities that are available and that the swing will accelerate them Richard Kim best known for leading the design and the BMW i3 and i8 is now the head of design for Faraday it's about it's not really about designing a car it's more about designing a brand designing from the ground up clean sheet of paper sheet of paper but is that that's an old way of doing things right well it literally and figuratively a clean sheet of paper I mean and you come from personally working on you know such kind of design crazed cars like I 8x3 do you draw from some of that knowledge or do you just start completely new yeah we're trying to kind of hit the reset button we're designing the car from the inside out and that's unique we do a lot moon oculus and augmented reality so it's a very unique org structure yes so maybe you can talk about where you are in the design process is this an actual car here that yes so this is one of the few prototypes we're working on we're working on multiple things at the same time and this is a model of something we did in this very new and unique process it's very very digital oriented a lot of VR a lot of AR so this is the results that's right when you mention this this car it's a process that starts you said from the interior going out so it's not just a shell eventually it's a guy's a lot of your hard wiring in there yeah what's the advantage to using to using AI into using these sort of intuitive ways of designing does that allow you different materials to work with so that process is giving us time we're doing things super fast third of the time that I'm used to and we're still doing it at high quality whereas the old older ways first to do maybe a clay model and then you do a hard model and then you paint it and then you do an interior same process and then you kind of put them together and you're like oh wait I missed something with our process everything is checked immediately it's not clear when Faraday will unveil its first product I expect to hear more from Faraday future in 2016 so by 2020 will we see your cars on the road absolutely