Faraday Future teases V9 joint-venture MPV for China
It will be built with the help of The9 Limited.
Faraday Future's first vehicle might still be stuck in some sort of limbo between development and production, but that's not stopping the company from looking to the future with a second vehicle, albeit a jointly developed one.
Faraday Future this week teased the V9 concept, a multipurpose vehicle based on the same platform as the FF 91. However, while the FF 91 is a creation all Faraday's own, the V9 is actually a partnership production. It's being built jointly with The9 Limited, an online game operator in China, but Faraday is in charge of its design. The V9 appears to be exclusively for the Chinese market.
Being in the conceptual stage still, there aren't many details to go on. Jia Yueting, Faraday Future's founder and CEO, said on Twitter that the V9 is "a new mobility luxury intelligent space that blends design, AI and seamless cabin connectivity." That all doesn't mean very much without some concrete examples to back it up, so we'll have to wait until Faraday or The9 cough up additional details.
The joint venture was initially announced in March, with The9 contributing up to $600 million in funding, while Faraday will give the JV the use rights to a tract of Chinese land earmarked for an EV manufacturing facility. The two companies hope that, eventually, they'll be able to crank out approximately 300,000 of these MPVs per year. The first preproduction V9 is expected to roll off the production line in 2020.
Meanwhile, the world still awaits the arrival of the FF 91, which Faraday Future introduced at a press conference at CES 2017. Thus far, the company has only completed a preproduction prototype, which it announced last August, but the company insists it'll be ready for series production by the end of 2019. Faraday has had its fair share of public struggles, whether it was nixing plans to build a factory in Nevada in favor of California or the fact that a legal battle with an investor caused the company to furlough a number of its staff.
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