Faraday Future starts shipping FF91 with many buzzwords and a $309k price
After starting production in March, Faraday Future has finally launched its FF91 EV, with an eye-watering $309k starting price and first deliveries starting tomorrow, May 31.
Faraday made the announcements in a livestream on its website today. It titled the announcements “FF 91 Final Launch & Faraday Future 2.0,” suggesting an entry into a new phase of life for the company, and describing the new car as a “new species.”
The FF91 was originally unveiled in 2017. At the time, Faraday said that it intended to produce the car in 2018.
But electric car startup observers are no stranger to delays, so that timeline slipped. And slipped, and slipped – until five years later, we are finally here, at the actual start of FF91 production.
Faraday promised the FF91 would have 1,050 horsepower, a 130 kWh battery capable of 381 miles of range, 200 kW charging, and self-driving capability. It also promised a 0-60 time of 2.27 seconds, which was faster than “other benchmark cars” (namely, Tesla) at the time.
These specs were incredible at the time and are still very good, though after five years of delays “other benchmark cars” have caught up and exceeded those numbers. But Faraday has kept the same specs as its original announcement without watering them down in the interim, which is nice. In fact, today’s video claimed the battery will be upped to 142kWh (though this might be nominal pack capacity, as opposed to 130kWh usable).
Faraday received over 64,000 reservations in 36 hours after the original unveiling. But these were unpaid hand-raisers, and on a more recent check-in, the company claimed to have 14,000 unpaid reservations and only 401 paid reservations, though we haven’t heard anything on those numbers in the last year.
Faraday started the stream with a long discussion about its “FF aiHyper 6×4 Architecture 2.0.” Frankly, our eyes glazed over a little bit in this portion, but here’s their slide “explaining” it. Good luck:
The company said that this is all meant to reflect 4 pillars of development – All-AI, All-Hyper, All-ability, and co-creation. As best we can tell, this was all meant to describe the car’s ability as taking advantage of the best strengths of sedans, sportscars and SUVs; comparing its capabilities to million-dollar hypercars; and using AI in its software-defined platform. Until recently, cars have been defined by hardware, but these days, many cars are being defined by software, with common software updates and modern infotainment systems.
With regards to the “co-creation” pillar, Faraday’s “co-creation platform,” which it is calling “The Mission Farad,” is essentially a referral program – refer friends to download Faraday’s app to get points (called Farads, the same name as the SI unit for electrical capacitance), and those points can be used for rewards. Faraday says these rewards “include awesome FPO titles to brag about on the FF App, Growth value and Co-creation points, and even future use of FF vehicles.”
In the future, Faraday seems like it will use this platform to gather customer feedback on its vehicles, and successful feedback/ideas will reward points to those who suggest it. Faraday is planning a “co-creation day” on June 6, which will presumably include more details on this. And we could imagine it turning into a sales referral program in the future.
The software-defined nature of the car enables various computing options, centered around a 27 inch rear screen (the “world’s largest in-car display”) and camera and a “10G in-vehicle network” (which isn’t a real thing) from three 5G antennas each connected to a different mobile carrier. Faraday mentioned that, among other things, this could enable livestreaming from inside the car (look out, INDI), and AI-powered contextual voice commands.
The car will also have an infrared camera in the driver’s seat to enable facial recognition for additional security. Faraday said that the car’s AI technology will enable it to “know you better than you know yourself,” which is frankly a little bit creepy, especially knowing that it has a camera on you at all times.
When you’re tired of all the livestreaming, you can relax in “spa mode” in the FF91’s “Zero G seats” capable of 60º recline.
Faraday now calls its car “the standard of Ultimate AI TechLuxury,” which is a bit of a mouthful. The company is aiming for the “ultra-spire” market, which as far as we can tell is its own term for luxury car customers. Embattled Faraday founder YT Jia compared the car’s level of luxury to that of Ferrari, Rolls-Royce and Maybach, setting quite a high bar.
Since then we’ve learned that Maybach is officially entering the EV market this year, so FF91 will have a direct competitor there. Faraday thinks that one day it will become a leader in the ultra-luxury market, which it says sells around 55,000 units globally per year. Though Jia also said that Faraday will not use the same upscale materials as are included in these other vehicles, and rather focus “silicon-based” luxury which allows owners to better leverage their time.
And of course, no automotive announcement can go without a discussion of autonomous driving technology, where Faraday made several claims about existing capabilities, and more coming later through over-the-air updates. Faraday calls these “FF aiDriving”:
In addition to these promises of imminent self-driving capability (hmm, where have we heard this before…), Faraday says that the FF 91 will have the ability to create custom and proprietary maps, perhaps in order to help train the car to drive around private grounds that are not captured by public road maps. But the FF91’s FF aiHypercar+ subscription system will set you back $14,900 per year – but hey, at least you’ll get some Farad points thrown in.
And, finally, there’s the price. All of the above will set you back a cool $309k for the limited-edition “FF 91 2.0 Futurist Alliance,” or $249k for the “FF 91 2.0 Futurist.” No news, yet, on what the base price of the standard 2.0 edition will be.
In a show of exceptional grace, the company also guarantees resale price, stating that it will ensure a 60% trade-in price after the first three years (thus only costing $41,200 per year!). But maybe owners should think twice before trading it in, because Jia says that the car will have “irreplaceable collectible value.”
Electrek’s Take
The FF91 was never going to be cheap, given how Faraday has always targeted it as a luxury vehicle, but now that we see the actual price, there’s a certain amount of reality that sets in.
With this pricing, Faraday is stuck between a rock and a hard place. It needs to set the price high in order to make money on a low production luxury vehicle, but a high price is a lot harder to command when there’s more competition in the market than there was 5 years ago, and when economic uncertainty and interest rates make it harder for people to justify these higher prices.
As we mentioned when Faraday started production, this has been a long time coming with lots of delays on the way. And, frankly, we did not expect the company to get this far.
When this car was originally announced, I noted that it seemed like a “kitchen sink” announcement, with a vehicle that included every conceivable concept car feature. In a word, I thought it was unrealistic.
So, it’s quite an accomplishment that they have made it here. Bringing any car to market is incredibly difficult, so they deserve praise for that.
But today’s livestream felt much the same as the original announcement. The original announcement seemed driven by hype buzzwords more than anything, and today is no different. AI is the buzzword of today, and it was mentioned hundreds of times in the ~100-minute livestream. Faraday is even changing its stock ticker to “FFAI” from “FFIE,” according to today’s announcement.
The company couldn’t even keep its own buzzwords straight, simultaneously audibly calling one feature “AI carpet” while subtitles and slides called it “Magic all-in-one” – and then continued into discussions of hyper multi-vectoring, 3rd aiSpace and SynXwap, which is apparently some sort of NFT (that was 2021’s nonsense buzzword, get with the times Faraday).
A tip: jumbled buzzword nonsense doesn’t make you sound accomplished or smarter than the observer, it makes you sound like a grifter. Knock it off, Faraday, if you can.
Despite finally shipping cars, this is only the beginning of the challenges related to building vehicles. Now Faraday has to find customers, and at the price they’re asking, that could be a challenge.
There are already some excellent electric cars on the market, from both mainstream players and upstarts. These span a pretty wide swath of price ranges and levels of luxury. While the FF 91 promises significant luxury and seems to focus on extreme comfort of its riders (and “riders” is the right term here, since the company’s focus on rear seat comfort is aimed at the Chinese market, where it’s common for the wealthy to have personal drivers), it’s not the only startup in the luxury electric car market.
Lucid Motors also occupies that space, and has some very good technology going for it, and a head start on Faraday. And yet, it’s still on rocky ground in this market, and is having some difficulty finding buyers even at the high 5 figure level. The same goes for the behemoth of the EV industry, Tesla, whose Model X accounts for a tiny percentage of the company’s sales – and its base price also has one less digit than the FF91’s.
Since Faraday is aiming well past this high price range, it’s likely to have an even larger struggle finding buyers. Maybe some will come out of the woodwork looking for a luxurious electric crossover from a startup other than Tesla or Lucid at three times the price, but that is a rather small niche at this point.
Especially if Faraday is going to call its own car an “elephant,” which it did not once, but twice during this announcement video.
Here’s the full livestream of the announcement:
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In a high-tech move that we can all get behind and isn’t dystopian at all, the City of Barcelona is feeding camera data from its city buses into an advanced AI, but they swear they’re not using the footage to to issue tickets to bad drivers. Yet.
Barcelona and its Ring Roads Low Emission Zone have earned lots of fans by limiting ICE traffic in the city’s core. The city’s latest idea to promote mass transit is the deployment of an artificial intelligence system developed by Hayden AI for automatic enforcement of reserved lanes and stops to improve bus circulation – but while it seems to be working as intended, it’s raising entirely different questions.
“Bus lanes are designed to help deliver reliable, fast, and convenient public transport service. But private vehicles illegally using bus lanes make this impossible,” explains Laia Bonet, First Deputy Mayor, Area for Urban Planning, Ecological Transition, Urban Services and Housing at the Ajuntament de Barcelona. “We are excited to partner with Hayden AI to learn where these problems occur and how they are impacting our public transport service.”
Currently operating as a pilot program on the city’s H12 and D20 bus lines, the system uses cameras installed on the city’s electric buses to detect vehicles that commit static violations in the bus lanes and stops (read: stopping or parking where you shouldn’t). The Hayden AI system then analyses that data and provides statistical information on what it captures while the bus is driving along on its daily route.
Hayden AI says that, while it photographs and records video sequences and collects contextual information of the violation, its cameras do not record license plates or people and no penalties are being issued to drivers or owners of the vehicles.
So far so good, right? But it’s what happens once the six mont pilot is over that seems like it should be setting off alarm bells.
Big Brother Bus is watching
The footage is manually reviewed by a Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB) officer, who reportedly reviewed some 2,500 violations identified by AI in May alone. But, while the system isn’t being used to issue violations during the pilot program, it easily could.
And, in fact, it already has … and the AI f@#ked up royally.
AI writes thousands of bad tickets
When AI was given the ability to issue citations in New York City earlier this year, it wrote more than 290,000 tickets (that’s right: two-hundred and ninety thousand) in just three months, generating nearly $21 million in revenue for the city. The was just one problem: thousands of those drivers weren’t doing anything wrong.
What’s more, the photos generated by the AI powered cameras were supposed to be approved only after being verified by a human, but either that didn’t happen, or it did happen and the human operator in question wasn’t paying attention, or (maybe the worst possibility) the violations were mistakes or hallucinations, and the human checker couldn’t tell the difference.
In OpenAI’s tests of its newest o3 and o4-mini reasoning models, the company found the o3 model hallucinated 33% of the time during its PersonQA tests, in which the bot is asked questions about public figures. When asked short fact-based questions in the company’s SimpleQA tests, OpenAI said o3 hallucinated 51% of the time. The o4-mini model fared even worse: It hallucinated 41% of the time during the PersonQA test and 79% of the time in the SimpleQA test, though OpenAI said its worse performance was expected as it is a smaller model designed to be faster. OpenAI’s latest update to ChatGPT, GPT-4.5, hallucinates less than its o3 and o4-mini models. The company said when GPT-4.5 was released in February the model has a hallucination rate of 37.1% for its SimpleQA test.
I don’t know about you guys, but if we had a local traffic cop that got it wrong 33% of the time (at best), I’d be surprised if they kept their job for very long. But AI? AI has a multibillion dollar hype train and armies of undereducated believers talking about singularities and building themselves blonde robots with boobs. And once the AI starts issuing tickets to the AI that’s driving your robotaxi, it can just call its buddy AI the bank to send over your money. No human necessary, at any point, and the economy keeps on humming.
But, like – I’m sure that’s fine. Embrace the future and all that … right?
SOURCES: Hayden AI, via Forbes, Motorpasión.
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A new report from global energy think tank Ember says batteries have officially hit the price point that lets solar power deliver affordable electricity almost every hour of the year in the sunniest parts of the world.
The study looked at hourly solar data from 12 cities and found that in sun-soaked places like Las Vegas, you could pair 6 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels with 17 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of batteries and get a steady 1 GW of power nearly 24/7. The cost? Just $104 per megawatt-hour (MWh) based on average global prices for solar and batteries in 2024. That’s a 22% drop in a year and cheaper than new coal ($118/MWh) and nuclear ($182/MWh) in many regions.
Ember calls it “24/365 solar generation,” and it’s not just a theoretical model. Cities like Muscat, Oman, and Las Vegas can hit that steady power mark for up to 99% of the hours in a year. Hyderabad, Madrid, and Buenos Aires can reach 80–95% of the way there using that same solar-plus-storage setup with some cloud cover. And even cloudier cities like Birmingham in the UK can cover about 62% of hours annually.
“This is a turning point in the clean energy transition,” said Kostantsa Rangelova, global electricity analyst at Ember. “Around-the-clock solar is no longer a distant dream; it’s an economic reality of the world. It unlocks game-changing opportunities for energy-hungry industries like data centres and manufacturing.”
This is an enormous opportunity for sunny regions in Africa and Latin America. Manufacturers and data centers could also tap into solar-plus-storage and skip long waits (and big bills) for new grid connections.
It’s not a silver bullet for grid-wide reliability, but it lets solar carry much more of the load, especially where sunshine is abundant. Batteries also help avoid costly grid expansions by allowing up to five times more solar to plug into existing connections.
In 2024 alone, global battery prices dropped 40%, which helped drive down solar-plus-storage costs by 22%. Record-low tenders from countries like Saudi Arabia point to even cheaper options coming soon.
Real-world projects are already online: The UAE built the world’s first gigawatt-scale 24-hour solar facility. Arizona is already home to solar-powered data centers. And as battery tech keeps improving, round-the-clock solar could become the backbone of clean energy systems in the world’s sunniest places.
Read more: This solar canopy cools wastewater and powers a city utility
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The Honda Prologue continues to surprise, ranking among the top ten most leased vehicles (gas-powered or EV) in the US in the first quarter. It was the only EV, outside of Tesla’s Model Y and Model 3, that made the list.
Honda Prologue EV ranks among most leased vehicles
After launching the Prologue in the US last March, Honda’s electric SUV took off. In the second half of the year, it was the second-best-selling electric SUV, trailing only the Tesla Model Y.
The Prologue remains a top-selling EV in the US this year, with over 13,500 units sold through May. That’s not too bad, considering it only sold 705 through May of last year.
According to a new Experian report (via Automotive News), Honda’s success is being driven by ultra-affordable lease rates. In the first quarter, nearly 60% of new EV buyers in the US chose to lease, up from just 36% a year ago.
Three EVs ranked in the top ten most leased vehicles, including the Tesla Model Y, Model 3, and Honda Prologue.
Tesla’s Model Y and Model 3 took the top two spots, while the Honda Prologue ranked number seven. Those who leased Tesla’s Model 3 paid $402 per month, Honda Prologue lessees paid $486 a month.
Given the average loan rate was $708 a month for those who bought it, it’s no wonder nearly 90% chose to lease. Under 9% chose to buy, while less than 2% paid cash.
The discounts are piling up, but for how long?
To give you a better idea, the average monthly payment for a new vehicle lease in the US in the first quarter was $595.
With over $20,000 in discounts, Honda’s luxury Acura brand is selling a surprising number of EVs in the US. The nearly $65,000 Acura ZDX is sold for under $40,000 on average in May, according to Cox Automotive’s EV Market Monitor report for May.
The trend is primarily thanks to the $7,500 federal EV tax credit, which is being passed on to customers through leasing.
With the Trump administration and Senate Republicans aiming to kill off federal subsidies, the savings could soon disappear. If the Senate’s recently proposed bill is passed, the $7,500 credit would expire within 180 days. It would not only make electric vehicles more expensive, but it would also put the US further behind China and others leading the shift to electrification.
Some automakers, including GM, are expected to continue offering the incentives. “GM has been very competitive on the incentives on their end, and that is not scheduled to end.”
After outselling Ford, GM’s Chevy is now the fastest-growing EV brand in the US through May. Chevy is starting to chip away at Tesla’s lead, largely thanks to the new Equinox EV, or “America’s most affordable +315 range EV,” as GM calls it.
According to Xperian, those who leased a new Chevy Equinox EV in Q1 paid $243 less than those who financed it. The electric Equinox stood out in Cox Automotive’s EV Market Monitor report with an average selling price under $40,000, even without incentives.
The Chevy Equinox EV remains one of the most affordable EVs on the market. Starting at just $34,995, the base LT FWD model offers an EPA-estimated range of 319 miles.
Looking to test out some of the most popular EVs for yourself? With Honda Prologue leases as low as $259 per month and Chevy Equinox EV leases starting at just $289 per month, the deals are hard to pass up right now while the incentives are still here. You can use our links below to find models in your area.
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