Tesla has competition from new rivals Faraday Future and NextEV
17 Dec 2015
Over the past few months, there had been unconfirmed reports about Tesla facing competition from a clutch of new electric car companies - in addition to a number of very serious potential contenders like Apple and Google.
The latest speculation is neither about the Google self-driving car, nor the Apple car which does not exist yet.
The current talk is about Faraday Future and NextEV, with Chinese money to back them and employees hired away from Tesla. But, according to reports, these car makers are nowhere near Tesla, they had no car to show, vis-à-vis Tesla's Model S and Model X SUV.
According to reports, Faraday Future would showcase a prototype of its vehicle at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas early next year.
Meanwhile, NextEV recently announced that it had hired former Cisco executive, Padmasree Warrior, to be its CEO. Warrier, who left her post as CTO and strategy head of Cisco Systems in September, announced yesterday that she would be joining the electric vehicle startup NextEV as its US CEO and head of global development.
In an interaction with fastcompany.com about the news, Warrior said after she left Cisco, she was trying to decide what to do next. She added, she wanted to pick an area where technology could be applied to solve some big problems.
She said she was inspired by mission and vision the company's founder William Li in joining the company.
Replying a question about what she hoped to accomplish in the next few months, she said her first priority was to start building a team in the US headquarters, where the company was based in San Jose.
Talking about building the company's "Supercar", she said the company was about a year old and was started at the end of 2014. It had a workforce of 400 people, most based in Shanghai, and a design house in Munich. She added, the company had so far built a formula e-certified race car as well.
''We'll be targeting what we call a supercar with very high performance targets to be in production at the end of 2016. And the intent with that car is primarily to check out the performance, assess the technology, and reuse a lot of that in the mass-market vehicle that will be following it.''
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