Faraday Future announces $2 billion in financing to bring its electric vehicles to market

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According to Electrek (This article and its images were originally posted on Electrek June 26, 2018 at 08:00AM.)

Electric vehicle startup Faraday Future confirms the long-rumored financing round that saved the company last year.

The California-based startup now announces that is closed $2 billion in financing to bring its electric vehicles to market.

As we previously reported, Stefan Krause, former BMW and Deutsche Bank CFO, and BMW’s head of EVs, Ulrich Kranz, were two of FF’s top executives until leaving to launch their own EV startup and bring several other FF employees with them.

At the time, sources told Electrek that Krause was able to raise funds for his new startup using the groundwork that he had done on the previous deals that he tried to close for FF, but that ended up failing due to disagreements with Jia Yueting, FF’s main financial backer who is now in control of the company.

Jia wanted to keep a controlling share of the company and remain CEO.

It now looks like he lost a controlling share, but he will be able to remain CEO.

Even though Faraday Future is officially based in California, it was founded by Chinese interest and the new investment is also coming from Asia.

What took so long for the deal to become official is apparently the approval from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which FF now claims to have.

After this new 2$ billion investment from Evergrande Health, a Hong Kong-based holding company mainly invested in media and healthcare businesses, FF has the following new share structure:

• 45% for Evergrande Health (Investor)
• 33% for the original shareholder (Jia Yueting)
• 22% for the team at FF

Faraday Future commented on what they plan to do with the money:

“FF will continue to use the committed funds to accomplish our top priority – finalizing the development and delivering the first production vehicle, FF 91 to both US and China markets. The investment will also support FF to expand its product pipeline, develop cutting-edge technologies and grow the business rapidly in the global marketplace, including our manufacturing facilities in Hanford, California and in Guangzhou Nansha, Guangdong Province, China.”

The FF91 was originally supposed to launch in 2018, but it now looks less likely than ever with only 6 months left in the year and still no factory completed.

With a 130kWh battery pack configuration, FF claims that the FF91 will have 1050 horsepower. Faraday Future says this is the most of any electric car (but actually falls short of some hypercars like the current Rimac Concept_One and now some other upcoming electric cars) and has 378 miles of EPA range.

Last year, it also set a new “production” EV record at Pike’s Peak – beating the previous year’s Tesla P90D by 20+ seconds.

We have been seeing a few beta prototypes of the car over the last year and we even saw a pretty cool side-by-side with the Tesla Model X, but FF built a few more beta prototypes ready for a new round of testing earlier this year.

Electrek’s Take

Over the last 3 years, FF went from flagship EV startup to a mess with unpaid suppliers and lawsuits on top of lawsuits.

As we previously said, they have built some cool EV technology during those years, but there was always only little hope of ever bringing anything to production.

Now with $2 billion in the bank, it would be hard to imagine that they couldn’t establish some kind of manufacturing capability to launch their products.

The thing is that their tech might have fallen behind during all those setbacks.

Either way, it might be worth it for us to keep a closer eye on them now that they are flush with cash again.

What do you think? Have you lost hope for FF? Let us know in the comment section below.

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This article and images were originally posted on [Electrek] June 26, 2018 at 08:00AM. Credit to Author Fred Lamber and Electrek | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day.

 

 

 

 

 

Wireless charging of moving electric vehicles overcomes major hurdle

Stanford scientists have created a device that wirelessly transmits electricity to a movable disc. The technology could some day be used to charge moving electric vehicles and personal devices. Credit: Sid Assawaworrarit/Stanford University

If electric cars could recharge while driving down a highway, it would virtually eliminate concerns about their range and lower their cost, perhaps making electricity the standard fuel for vehicles.

Now Stanford University scientists have overcome a major hurdle to such a future by wirelessly transmitting electricity to a nearby moving object. Their results are published in the June 15 edition of Nature.

“In addition to advancing the wireless charging of vehicles and personal devices like cellphones, our new technology may untether robotics in manufacturing, which also are on the move,” said Shanhui Fan, a professor of electrical engineering and senior author of the study. “We still need to significantly increase the amount of electricity being transferred to charge electric cars, but we may not need to push the distance too much more.”

The group built on existing technology developed in 2007 at MIT for transmitting electricity wirelessly over a distance of a few feet to a stationary object. In the new work, the team transmitted electricity wirelessly to a moving LED lightbulb. That demonstration only involved a 1-milliwatt charge, whereas electric cars often require tens of kilowatts to operate. The team is now working on greatly increasing the amount of electricity that can be transferred, and tweaking the system to extend the transfer distance and improve efficiency.

Driving range

Wireless charging would address a major drawback of plug-in electric cars – their limited driving range. Tesla Motors expects its upcoming Model 3 to go more than 200 miles on a single charge and the Chevy Bolt, which is already on the market, has an advertised range of 238 miles. But electric vehicle batteries generally take several hours to fully recharge. A charge-as-you-drive system would overcome these limitations.

“In theory, one could drive for an unlimited amount of time without having to stop to recharge,” Fan explained. “The hope is that you’ll be able to charge your electric car while you’re driving down the highway. A coil in the bottom of the vehicle could receive electricity from a series of coils connected to an electric current embedded in the road.”

Some transportation experts envision an automated highway system where driverless electric vehicles are wirelessly charged by solar power or other renewable energy sources. The goal would be to reduce accidents and dramatically improve the flow of traffic while lowering greenhouse gas emissions.

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Wireless technology could also assist GPS navigation of driverless cars. GPS is accurate up to about 35 feet. For safety, autonomous cars need to be in the center of the lane where the transmitter coils would be embedded, providing very precise positioning for GPS satellites.

 

Magnetic resonance

Mid-range wireless power transfer, as developed at Stanford and other research universities, is based on magnetic resonance coupling. Just as major power plants generate alternating currents by rotating coils of wire between magnets, electricity moving through wires creates an oscillating magnetic field. This field also causes electrons in a nearby coil of wires to oscillate, thereby transferring power wirelessly. The transfer efficiency is further enhanced if both coils are tuned to the same magnetic resonance frequency and are positioned at the correct angle.

However, the continuous flow of electricity can only be maintained if some aspects of the circuits, such as the frequency, are manually tuned as the object moves. So, either the energy transmitting coil and receiver coil must remain nearly stationary, or the device must be tuned automatically and continuously – a significantly complex process.

To address the challenge, the Stanford team eliminated the radio-frequency source in the transmitter and replaced it with a commercially available voltage amplifier and feedback resistor. This system automatically figures out the right frequency for different distances without the need for human interference.

“Adding the amplifier allows power to be very efficiently transferred across most of the three-foot range and despite the changing orientation of the receiving coil,” said graduate student Sid Assawaworrarit, the study’s lead author. “This eliminates the need for automatic and continuous tuning of any aspect of the circuits.”

Assawaworrarit tested the approach by placing an LED bulb on the receiving coil. In a conventional setup without active tuning, LED brightness would diminish with distance. In the new setup, the brightness remained constant as the receiver moved away from the source by a distance of about three feet. Fan’s team recently filed a patent application for the latest advance.

The group used an off-the-shelf, general-purpose amplifier with a relatively low efficiency of about 10 percent. They say custom-made amplifiers can improve that efficiency to more than 90 percent.

“We can rethink how to deliver electricity not only to our cars, but to smaller devices on or in our bodies,” Fan said. “For anything that could benefit from dynamic, wireless charging, this is potentially very important.”

Explore further:
Wireless power could revolutionize highway transportation, researchers say

More information:
Sid Assawaworrarit et al. Robust wireless power transfer using a nonlinear parity?time-symmetric circuit, Nature (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nature22404

Journal reference:
Nature

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This article and images was originally posted on [Phys.org ] June 14, 2017 at 01:09PM

Provided by: Stanford University

 

 

 

 

Tesla surpasses BMW to become the 4th most valuable car company in the world

Over the past few months, Tesla’s valuation surged past Ford and GM but following another surge over the past 2 weeks, Tesla’s market capitalization is now worth more than BMW’s.

It is now the 4th most valuable car company in the world.

The feat is hard to understand when just looking at the deliveries of both companies. BMW delivered over 2 million cars last year while Tesla delivered fewer than 80,000 vehicles during the same period.

Yet, as of today, investors value the German automaker at $61.2 billion and Tesla at just over $61.6 billion (at least briefly intraday today with a new all-time high of $376).

Only Toyota, Daimler, and Volkswagen are more valuable than Tesla at this point.

But it’s clear that Tesla investors are looking ahead of current deliveries and at Tesla’s ambition to ramp up significantly over the next few years to reach an annual production of 1 million cars in 2020.

Despite Tesla’s current small size, maybe BMW should worry. Facebook millionaire turned venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya recently suggested that the Model 3 is already stealing sales from the 3-Series even before they start deliveries:

As we previously reported, investors are also not only looking Tesla as an automaker anymore, which makes it hard to compare its valuation to other automakers.

Tesla is trying to own the entire energy process from generation to consumption. It wants its customers to not only buy its vehicles, but to also power them with energy generated through its own products (solar arrays), stored in its Powerpacks and Powerwalls, and charged through its level 2 chargers and Superchargers.

Therefore, if you want to make a comparison, it’s closer to an automaker who also owns an oil company and everything in between, like the refineries and gas stations.

In the context that the entire automotive industry is moving from internal combustion engines to electric motors, it’s a very strategic position to take.

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This article and images was originally posted on [Electrek] June 9, 2017 at 03:33AM

Fred Lambert    @FredericLambert

 

 

 

Will the future of electric vehicles include instantly rechargeable batteries?

Video via PurdueResearchPark

Why it matters to you

Electric vehicles seem well on their way to becoming the latest automotive trend, but finding a good way to power them has been a challenge. Purdue University may have an answer.

Thanks to a new technology from Purdue University researchers, we may in time be driving cars that are powered by an “instantly rechargeable” battery (called Ifbattery) that are considered safe, affordable, and environmentally friendly. Capable of recharging both electric and hybrid vehicle batteries, the process would be similar to that of refueling with gas, but instead of using fossil fuels, we’d be using electricity.

“Designing and building enough of these recharging stations requires massive infrastructure development, which means the energy distribution and storage system is being rebuilt at tremendous cost to accommodate the need for continual local battery recharge,” said Eric Nauman, co-founder of Ifbattery and a Purdue professor of mechanical engineering, basic medical sciences and biomedical engineering. “Ifbattery is developing an energy storage system that would enable drivers to fill up their electric or hybrid vehicles with fluid electrolytes to re-energize spent battery fluids much like refueling their gas tanks.”

Ifbattery depends on an energy storage system that lets drivers fill up on fluid electrolytes in order to re-energize used battery fluids. Spent electrolytes could be quickly dropped off at gas stations, “which would then be sent in bulk to solar farms, wind turbine installations, or hydroelectric plants for reconstitution or re-charging into the viable electrolyte and reused many times,” explained John Cushman, Purdue University distinguished professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary science, who led the research team responsible for the technology.

“Electric and hybrid vehicle sales are growing worldwide and the popularity of companies like Tesla is incredible, but there continue to be strong challenges for industry and consumers of electric or hybrid cars,” Cushman said. “The biggest challenge for industry is to extend the life of a battery’s charge and the infrastructure needed to actually charge the vehicle. The greatest hurdle for drivers is the time commitment to keeping their cars fully charged.”

But now, that hurdle may have been crossed, as this latest innovation could eliminate the time needed to recharge a car battery, and furthermore, reduce the need for potentially expensive recharging stations.

Next up for the Ifbattery team is finding additional financing, as the researchers hope to soon build large-scale prototypes and find manufacturing partners.

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This article and images was originally posted on [Digital Trends] June 5, 2017 at 03:40AM

By Lulu Chang — Updated June 5, 2017 8:46 am

 

 

 

 

Audi tells dealerships to get behind electric vehicles because it will dominate the market within 10 years

At this point, most industry watchers would agree that car dealers are a barrier to the electrification of the car industry. Recent studies have painted a negative (borderline disastrous) picture of the electric vehicle shopping experience. Car dealers’ lack of interest in selling EVs have led to poor knowledge about the vehicles, no inventories, cars often being left uncharged and not ready for test drives.

Knowing car dealers make most of their money from service and that EVs have fewer moving parts and therefore require less service, Tesla anticipated the issue and decided to operate its own sales force. But other automakers are stuck with their dealership networks and they are now trying to get them on-board with EVs in order to be competitive in the ongoing electrification of the industry.

The National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) were holding their annual convention and exhibition in New Orleans last week and during his keynote address, Audi of America President Scott Keogh tried to convince car dealers to embrace electric vehicles.

Audi has several electric vehicles coming to market soon, starting with the production version of its quattro e-tron concept (pictured above) next year, and they would appreciate if their dealers would get behind the new electric lineup of vehicles.

Keogh told dealers that range anxiety concerns will disappear in the next few years with electric vehicles achieving longer ranges and a more extensive charging infrastructure.

The executive expects that most of the industry will go entirely “battery-electric” within the next 10 years (via WardAuto):

“All this fright about where am I going to get a charge is going to go away extremely fast. The technology on this front is moving at a staggering pace. You’re going to be looking at a marketplace in the next seven, eight, nine, 10 years where for 30 or 40 some brands their entire business is going to be battery-electric vehicles.”

It’s a surprisingly aggressive timeline for an established automaker. Though Audi is part of the Volkswagen group and they are committed to the mass production of electric vehicles.

During his presentation, Keogh acknowledged that the vehicles will require less service, but he suggested that they start looking at new sales channels with electric vehicles, like home charging solutions:

“We have to look at alternative channels and start to make money. These cars are going to have to be fixed less. But you’re going to have a host of opportunities around the battery and helping the customer in their home. You have the customers, you have the scale, you have the (marketplace) presence. You need to become the 1-stop shop (on electrification). You need to be a part of their whole electric ecosystem.”

We expect that more automakers will start to hold similar talks with their dealer networks in order to facilitate the introduction of EVs in their inventories. It will create opportunities for dealers to innovate, but it will also weed out those too slow to accept that the industry is changing.

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This article was originally posted on Electrek

by Fred Lambert

A Tesla Co-Founder Is Making Electric Garbage Trucks With Jet Tech, and Why Not | ESIST

A Tesla co-founder is selling a turbine-electric drivetrain for garbage trucks. MACK TRUCKS

TURBINE ENGINES ARE ideal technology for jets. They cram piles of power into a small, lightweight package, and have revolutionized air travel since their invention in the 1930s. Ian Wright sees them revolutionizing something else: garbage trucks.Wright is a founder of Tesla Motors who left early on to launch Wrightspeed. He wanted to build a high-performance electric sports cars and even created a concept called the X1that could hit 60 mph in under three seconds. But Wright realized he could make a much bigger difference tackling trucks most often associated with early morning wakeups, diesel fumes, and the stench of rotting garbage.

Sure, garbage trucks are boring. But they’re devilish environmental actors, belching diesel exhaust all day as they creep through the city. So Wright developed an electric drivetrain that bolts right in. When the battery runs low, a turbine spins up, burning fuel to generate electricity to keep the truck moving. Coupled to motors at the wheels, it makes the system more similar to a train, which have used hybrid engines for decades, or a hugely overpowered Chevrolet Volt.

Garbage trucks should be quieter, even with the turbine generator running. THE RATTO GROUP

Wright says the setup trumps the inefficient straight-six diesel engine and heavy gearbox now used in trucks. “If you were to start with a clean sheet, you’d make it more like an locomotive.”

These 66,000-pound trucks won’t win any drag races (no ludicrous mode), but the innovative drivetrain could reduce fuel consumption by 70 percent. The electric motors provide 400 horsepower and enough torque to happily trundle up a 40 percent grade. The motors double as generators, capturing energy as the truck slows. It’s a seriously beefed up version of what your Prius offers: They provide 1,000 horsepower of stopping power—the kind of might a truck driver with a heavy load on a stop-start route tends to demand.

An overnight charge provides 20 miles of range before the turbine kicks in. At just 250 pounds, about one tenth the weight of a conventional engine of similar power, it’s a featherweight. If you’re worrying about noise, relax: The trucks run on electricity most of the time, and even with the turbine running they are said to be far quieter than diesel trucks.

Electric motors provide propulsion and brake regeneration. WRIGHTSPEED

That sounds great, but turbines have a spotty history in vehicles. Chrysler plopped them into cars in the 1960s and ’70s but gave up on the scheme. A Lotus racecar of similar vintage was fast but unreliable, and generally considered crazy. Other automakers have considered small turbines as range extenders, but found they don’t scale down well.

But they could be just right for trucks. Turbine engines are simpler than reciprocating engines. They can run on almost any flammable liquid (Chrysler claimed its car could run on everything from from peanut oil to perfume), but Wrightspeed plans on using easy diesel or natural gas. The high temperature, continuous combustion means pretty much everything is burned, leaving little pollution. “The exhaust is incredibly clean,” says Wright. “You can meet California emissions without any after-treatment.”

Wrightspeed’s turbine drivetrain, batteries, and motors fit in the space of a conventional diesel engine, gearbox, differentials, and two rear axles. The company offers kits to retrofit existing trucks and outfit new ones.

FedEx has ordered 25 and already outfitted two delivery vehicles. The first retrofitted Mack LR garbage truck is about to ship. Wrightspeed won’t reveal pricing, but one estimate puts it around $200,000. The turbine should run for about 10,000 hours between service, cutting maintenance costs along with fuel bills.

There are around 150,000 refuse trucks in the US. Giving them turbines may finally ushers in the era of jet-powered vehicles we’ve been waiting for since the 1960s—even if they aren’t quite the vehicles anyone imagined.

Source: A Tesla Co-Founder Is Making Electric Garbage Trucks With Jet Tech, and Why Not | WIRED