Disconnect: the electric car market needs a Ford, not a Faraday Future

Disconnect is a weekly column in which Tech in Asia’s Charlie Custer pokes at holes, plays devil’s advocate, or otherwise attempts to rain on the tech industry’s parade.

CES is upon us, and with it is coming the traditional deluge of new gadget news. But among the first real headlines of the event has been the announcement of Chinese-backed electric vehicle startup Faraday Future’s new hypercar. With more power than a McLaren P1 and ridiculous features like a razor-thin fin that doubles as a screen, it’s a vehicle that’s designed to impress. Consequently, it’s a vehicle that will do absolutely nothing to change the electric vehicle market.

Look, I get that this is how the car market works. For some reason, before releasing a car for normal humans, car companies – especially new ones like Faraday Future – all seem to feel obliged to come out with some ridiculous supercar concept. It’s a marketing gimmick. But it still seems like a waste of time. What’s an electric supercar? It’s a car that’s super fast, super eye-catching, and super impractical. A car that the company can attempt to use to prove its competence without having to actually, you know, design and build a functional mass-market motor vehicle.

Nobody should be impressed by Faraday Future’s FF Zero1. Any car company can throw horsepower and smart tech features into a spaceship-looking frame and call it a concept. And when you’ve got a vehicle so impractical that it requires a helmet, what is it really showing us about Faraday Future’s future market offerings? Absolutely nothing.

Fuck concepts. What I want electric car startups and tech companies like Tesla and Faraday Future to start delivering is a proof of concept: proof that they can produce appealing, affordable mass market vehicles. Concept supercars look sexy, but they don’t really do anything to develop the electric car market, and nor will Faraday Future’s first production car if it comes in at a price north of US$100,000 (as it very likely will). The electric car market has plenty of Ferraris already. What it needs now is a Ford. A car that can, like Ford’s mass-produced models in the early 20th century, bring production costs down and drive up consumer adoption of this new technology.

Tesla’s first comparatively affordable car, the US$35,000 Model 3, will come out in 2017 (although knowing Tesla’s history, I wouldn’t consider that a firm deadline). That’s the electric vehicle people should really be excited about right now. US$35,000 still isn’t chump change, obviously, but that price point should make the vehicle affordable to middle-class consumers all over the world. Having a great electric vehicle at that price point could really drive up EV adoption and change the car market entirely. That’s something a hundred luxury electric supercars could never do.

So Faraday Future has had its fun. But after that, EV tech companies, can we agree that the masturbatory concept car phase is over and move on to designing vehicles that everyday people might want to – and could afford to – drive?

Everybody always talks about producing a game-changer, but the game-changing electric vehicle is not going to be a luxury car. If you really want to change the game, EV tech firms, then produce something that’s great and mass-market affordable. Traditional car companies are already producing electric cars at mass market prices. If you truly want to bring something to the table they don’t, you’ve got to beat them at their own game, not just offer high-powered EVs that cost quadruple the price of a Chevy Volt.

(Update: Removed references to a Letv car, because Letv is the financial backer of Faraday.)