Faraday Future FF 91 Gets EPA Range Rating

• Faraday Future FF 91 Futurist received EPA rating of 381 miles, ahead of the expected start of production later this year.

• The FF 91 is expected to have a starting price of $180,000 once the full lineup reaches production, offering 1050 hp courtesy of a tri-motor layout.

• The model has suffered delays and now faces an ever-growing cast of competitors, which have upstaged it in range and power.

The long promised Faraday Future appears to be right around the corner, at last, having just received one of the last official nods from regulators. This is indeed the point at which the EV starts to seem real after years of delays and corporate drama, even though some important hurdles still remain.

The good news is the FF 91 Futurist will offer an EPA-estimated range of 381 miles, putting the long crossover into an elite club when it comes to this metric, but still over a hundred miles below the industry leader. This didn't stop the company from boasting.

"This rating is a significant increase from the company’s previous estimates and makes the FF 91 a leader in miles of range in the luxury electrified vehicle market," Faraday Future said in a statement.

In case you're wondering, this EPA range puts the FF 91 into a distant third place among high-end EVs.

This range may have been revolutionary several years ago, but it has now been upstaged by other EVs such as the 520-mile Lucid Air, as well as segment old timers like the Tesla Model S, with its 405-mile range. Even the much smaller and more affordable Tesla Model 3 sedan is not far off, boasting a top range of 358 miles.

Perhaps the FF 91 will be able to wear the crown for some other objective metric, such as horsepower, since it claims to be "the first high-end, high-performance, luxury, intelligent EV."

But it won't come in first by that metric either upon arrival, as its 1050-hp rating is identical to that of the Lucid Air Grand Touring Performance Edition—and notably short of the 1111-hp mark for the Lucid Air Dream Edition. There's yet another Lucid Air variant above that—the Air Sapphire promising 1200 hp.

But the FF 91 faces other, more important hurdles at the moment. This EV is expected to land with a starting price around $180,000, in addition to arriving in a much different landscape than the one in which it was designed. This includes a variety of high-priced EVs from established automakers that weren't on sale even two years ago, as well as a growing number of lower-priced EVs.

Faraday Future still has not disclosed a firm date for the start of production in Hanford, California, having last forecast it for the third or fourth quarter of this year back in July. The fourth quarter is days away.

"Due to recent supply chain issues, start of production and first deliveries of the company's FF 91 flagship electric vehicle in the United States are now expected to commence in the third or fourth quarter of 2022," the company said in an SEC filing over the summer, while indicating that it was seeking additional funds to keep operations running through the end of the year.

Aside from where the company plans to get more cash for the first half of 2023, has so much time passed between the debut of the prototype and the best-case scenario arrival time to render Faraday Future's recipe redundant if not outdated? Joining Lucid at the high end of the market now are the Mercedes-Benz EQS and BMW i7.

This growing market for premium EVs is one reason that Jaguar shelved its own luxury EV at the eleventh hour, evidently judging the field too crowded even before a number of competitors had arrived.

The FF 91 will face an uphill battle if it arrives this year as scheduled, with the only tailwind being possible disruption of auto production in Europe this winter due to gas shortages. And setting apart the FF 91 is its shape: It's a crossover while these other rivals are low-slung sedans.