Yahoo Autos Faraday Future FF 91 has only 401 reservations. Not 14,000
When you make a bed as spacious, luxurious and mobile as the FF 91, it's inevitable you'd want to sleep in it, right? That's what Faraday Future is doing, but not the way it intended. The eight-year-old-yet-still-nascent EV automaker spent the first quarter livestreaming the launch of the production FF 91, then wrangling with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over inaccurate statements about the number of reservations it had for the FF 91. Previous claims alleged 14,000 reservations, the expectation among outsiders being that people had put down $5,000 to secure the premier Futurist Alliance Edition trim or put down $1,500 to bag the slightly less frilly Futurist trim. Thanks to financial reports for the first quarter, we now know the actual number is 401 reservations. Seems that the 14,000 figure was a measure of "indications of interest," otherwise known as hand-raisers, and didn't involve money changing hands.
This is the part where startups learn, publicly, that making cars is hard. Even Tesla had its moments, and plenty of them, but they seem so long ago. Compare Faraday Future's order book with the 200,000 reservations for the Ford F-150 Lightning, the Cadillac Lyriq's intended production run being sold out for the 2022 and 2023 model years, and Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz admitting they can barely keep up with EV demand.
