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Faraday Future calls it quits in Nevada for now, focuses on FF91 production

The company still owns land in the state.

Faraday Future FF 91
Faraday Future FF 91 / Image Credit: Faraday Future
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The Nevada Independent reports that Faraday Future voluntarily cut ties with Nevada, the car company sending a letter to state officials that declared Faraday unsuitable for tax breaks and incentives. Included with that letter: a check for $16,200 to repay all incentive money Nevada proffered to the electric dreamers. Steve Hill, in the Nevada Governor's Office of Economic Development, said the letter has "basically dissolved" the two-year-old public-private affair "at absolutely no cost to the state and local governments." Nevada officials will distribute the roughly $620,000 in no-longer-needed tax incentives that have accrued in a trust fund since 2015. Faraday still owns the land it purchased at the Apex business park.

With that done, we have three questions for Faraday. Wordsworth composed two of them in 1804 in his Intimations of Immortality: "Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?" The company emerged from stealth - mostly - only two years ago. Faraday spent most of 2016, publicly at least, courting press and hurling superlatives. Then came October 2016, when the LA Times started an article with, " Faraday Future's future is looking bleaker." That piece detailed troubles at the stalled Nevada factory and mentioned an exodus of company executives.

In the intervening 11 months, the CEO left the building and took the money geyser with him, more executives skedaddled, a Series A investment round flopped, debtors occupied offices, execs put assets on the commercial yard sale table, and only a month ago Faraday pledged its Gardena, California headquarters as collateral for a $13.75-million loan. Those aren't dastardly omens - companies break, and spill, a lot of eggs when making visionary omelettes. It's the small things that presage the end is nigh: when the now-ex-CEO writes a letter suggesting no one else could understand what it's like to be ginormously overextended, two months later Faraday's VP of R&D - an ex-Tesla executive, no less - explains the company's troubles to the BBC as if no one has any idea how expensive it is to found a car company, and when the PR department concocts gibberish to announce a new initiative. Trouble, meet River City.

The firm's VP of Global Manufacturing says FF's "laser-focused" on getting the FF91 super SUV to market by the end of 2018. Now that Nevada's out of the way, Faraday's put all bets on its production factory in Hanford, California - a facility leased using last month's loan. Placing odds on a struggling manufacturer with zero pedigree successfully selling an acutely unfinished, six-figure family hauler roughly 12 months from now takes the finest kind of oblivious guts. The best thing going for Faraday is that the company isn't formally deceased, and we admit we're in no hurry to see it there. But if things do flatline, we'll slip on our tire-kicking shoes and head to FF's offices to pose our third question while flipping a thumb at the FF91: "What'll you take for this display model?"

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