The Chinese billionaire behind Faraday Future just unveiled his own electric car

LeEco founder and CEO Jia Yueting (left) shows off the LeSee at an event this afternoon in Beijing. All photos: LeEco’s Weibo.

Faraday Future made headlines at the start of the year with its spectacular concept car, but it also caused consternation at the lack of a realistic road-going car that could compete with Tesla. The Chinese billionaire who bankrolls US-based Faraday, Jia Yueting, put that right today at an event in Beijing by showing off the LeSee.

But this isn’t a Faraday Future vehicle – it’s branded LeEco, after the billionaire’s Netflix-style service.

Jia summoned the autonomously-driving all-electric sedan onto the stage using his phone. “I can’t hold back my tears,” he said, after the car had stopped in place. “Everyone was questioning us and laughing at us, but we’re still presenting this car here today.”

“The Chinese auto industry is doing more reverse engineering than active engineering,” he stated, slamming the copycats. Perhaps he had in mind this SUV that’s a perfect clone of the Porsche Macan. “A lot of the work is just copying others’ effort. But this will change,” he said.

With a fortune worth US$6 billion from his streaming video site Le (formerly called Letv), Jia has been revamping the web company radically in the past couple of years, venturing into the entertainment industry and smartphones. He recently renamed the entire firm LeEco. The company made clear its intentions to create electric cars back in late 2014, and then towards the close of last year it emerged that Jia was backing the secretive Faraday.

It’s not known if the LeSee would be manufactured in the US by Faraday at its upcoming Nevada plant. We’ve contacted LeEco for details.

See: Faraday Future’s electric supercar concept is an insane taste of Tesla challengers to come