Faraday Future Only Has 401 Preorders for its FF 91 Electric Car

Photo: Faraday Future

Faraday Future is going through it right now. In the past few months alone, the company has had executives subpoenaed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the company was caught inflating the number of preorders it had received. Now, it seems, we know exactly how many people actually put in an order for the company’s first car. It was 401 people — less than the capacity of a standard Boeing 747 commercial airliner.

That’s right, in the more than five years that Faraday Future has existed, it was only able to muster a tick over 400 reservations for its FF 91 EV crossover, according to a report from CNET.

Perspective buyers had to lay down some cash for their preorders: $1,500 for a “Futurist” trim or $5,000 for a “Futurist Alliance Edition” model. It should be said, those deposits are fully refundable.

Faraday Future Stretching the Truth

Earlier this year, Faraday Future claimed it had received more than 14,000 reservations, but the vast majority of those didn’t include any sort of down payment or monetary transaction at all. It’s hard to assume a no-commitment reservation will turn into an actual vehicle sale.

The company reported a $149-million operating loss in Q1 of 2022 alone. Compare that to Faraday’s $19-million operating loss in the same quarter of 2021, and things are really starting to look bleak.

The company attributes this to bigger spending on engineering, design and testing services, as well as just plane-old hiring more people. The fledgling automaker report over $700 million in total assets and a bit more than $275 million in cash on hand.

In theory (and I repeat, in theory) the FF 91 is supposed to be on sale by the third quarter of this year. The car was first shown to the world at CES in 2017, and we are still patiently waiting to actually see a production version that you might be able to buy.