For “production” cars, though. Odd.
Faraday Future, the embattled electric vehicle company that is still in the process of properly starting up and becoming a real player in the EV world, has just broken a record at the 2017 Pikes Peak hillclimb event by posting a time of 11-minutes 25.083-seconds, beating a Tesla Model S P90D time by more than 20-seconds.
FF claims that the FF91’s time is now the benchmark for “production” vehicles, though we take that with a pinch of salt. It takes a serious stretch of the imagination to consider the FF91 a production car, as it’s neither in production nor has it actually gone on sale. Of course, FF isn’t the only party guilty of doing this; the NIO EP9 also publicised its new “production” car lap record at the Nürburgring, and you can understand why we use quotation marks.
The FF91 used in the run was claimed to be “production designed” and uses “production representative hardware,” though we’re inclined not to believe them. It’s missing a lot of the flashy hardware that wowed the world when it debuted at CES earlier this year, as well as an interior and its supporting tech hardware too (as evidenced in a video).
While we’re happy to hurl abuse at Faraday Future for its exaggerated claims, ridiculous vocabulary (stop trying to disrupt and reformat the world, guys), the time posted by the FF91 is really very competitive indeed, shaming Tesla’s previous effort (though they could come back at FF with a Model S P100D next year) and leaving anything combustion-powered behind by a large margin.
Curiously, team Unplugged Performance didn’t show up at this years’ event, despite being registered to race a Tesla Model S P100D that would have given the FF91 a run for its money. Admittedly, the Tesla would have carried with it a working interior and ancillaries, which would have likely still have it on the back foot against the FF beta car.
Read our previous articles on Faraday Future here.
