This story is part of our continuing coverage of CES 2020, including tech and gadgets from the showroom floor.
Faraday Future CEO Carsten Breitfeld plans to use the FF91, the company’s first model, as a monetizing platform. Speaking to Digital Trends, he revealed one of his ideas is a shuttle service between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
“If you drive from Los Angeles to [Las Vegas], it takes more or less as much time as flying from the LAX airport. Driving is a little bit longer, but not by much. We think the business class passengers would like a fleet of those cars where you can call it to your home, sit in a first-class experience that’s much better than any business class, and pay the same price. We think it will be very attractive,” he explained on the sidelines of CES 2020.
270 miles separate Los Angeles and Las Vegas, according to Google Maps. Breitfeld claimed the electric FF91 has a range of over 360 miles, so it would be capable of linking the two cities without stopping for a charge. It would need to fill up before heading back, of course. While they’re riding, passengers could sleep, work, watch movies and television shows on the massive rear-seat entertainment system, or enjoy what Faraday Future calls a spa mode.
Faraday Future is planning to launch the FF91 with level-three autonomous technology, which corresponds to conditional automation. Breitfeld realistically predicted it will take longer than expected to reach level five, which is a fully autonomous car that doesn’t need a human behind the wheel, so the cars in the shuttle service will be driven by a chauffeur. It’s not too far-fetched to imagine a fleet of self-driving prototypes, but we’re not there yet.
Of course, all of this depends on whether Faraday Future can successfully ramp up production of the FF91. It is waiting for its final round of funding, and it expects the first examples will begin rolling out of the Hanford, California, factory by the end of 2020. There’s no word yet on when the shuttle service could start.
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