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On a recent December afternoon, the California headquarters of the secretive electric car company Faraday Future buzzed with activity. Hundreds of engineers and designers, many of them veterans of the automobile and technology industries, bustled about the former Nissan factory.

Faraday Future bills itself as more than just a car company. In the words of its head of corporate affairs, it wants to sell a “virtual ecosystem,” which it defines in vague terms.

But exactly what kind of company Faraday Future is becomes less clear as new information emerges about its business operations. Over the past three weeks, several scathing news reports revealed the company’s instability, outlining unpaid bills, hundreds of millions of dollars in unaccounted liabilities, and a wave of staff departures.

In two weeks, the company will unveil its first production vehicle at CES in Las Vegas. The stakes are high for Faraday Future, which has had an unusually tumultuous year for such a young company. A year ago, Faraday Future (or FF as it prefers) emerged from out of nowhere, backed by a lot of Chinese money and promising big, world-changing things. The company’s roster boasted a who’s-who of employees from Apple, Tesla, Ferrari, and BMW. It also suggested a novel approach to car ownership, hinting at a sort of subscription model, where users could call up different kinds of self-driving electric vehicles depending on their needs.

But since then, FF has experienced a series of public setbacks. The company flubbed its big CES debut a year ago, unveiling a static, Batmobile-like concept car instead of the production-ready electric vehicle it had promised. Construction on its $1 billion Nevada factory was delayed. Several high-level staffers jumped ship.

Mounting debts, unpaid bills, supplier lawsuits, and financial mismanagement

Monthly stipends from the company’s main investor, Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting, have dried up. And a distracting, and competing, side project by Jia’s company LeEco, has led some employees to question which company they’re really working for. FF describes Jia as a strategic partner, but one ex-employee told The Verge the relationship was more like “indentured servitude.”

Against the deluge of bad press, FF invited The Verge to take a behind-the-scenes look as the company prepared for CES on the condition that the tour would focus on research and design, and no business-related questions would be answered. The Verge asked anyway, and the company’s executives shed some light on the company, largely in glowing terms about their ties to Jia and LeEco.

Phone interviews with a half-dozen former employees attest to the mismanagement described in other recent reports. The Verge has learned that the company’s financial situation is dire and mounting debts, unpaid bills, supplier lawsuits, and financial mismanagement have all served to chip away at Faraday Future’s foundation. In addition, these sources revealed to The Verge that the company’s intellectual property is not owned by FF, but by a separate entity named FF Cayman Global, a revelation which raises questions about Faraday Future’s relationship with its investors and suppliers, and could further endanger the company’s success.

FF’s expansive headquarters is located in a former Nissan factory on a nondescript block in Gardena, California, just south of metro Los Angeles. The Verge was invited to tour the offices, as well as the design studio and the company’s pilot factory, where it builds its prototypes. FF planned to give a similar tour to Motor Trend, which first broke the story of the secretive company’s existence back in mid-2015, at a later date. FF’s press office said the tour was “strictly” about technology and not business — though Nick Sampson, the company’s senior vice president of engineering, did answer some business-related questions at the end of the two-and-a-half-hour tour.

“we’re all about liberation. Extreme liberation”

No photography or video was permitted — before the tour began, an employee placed yellow stickers over my iPhone’s cameras. It was a balmy December afternoon in LA and outside the company’s headquarters, many FF employees sat at outdoor picnic tables and nibbled on lunches provided by the company. The parking lot was filled to capacity, a clear sign of a startup on a hiring spree.

Before the tour, head of corporate affairs Greg Adams gave a presentation, where he said FF’s first production car would be “a super device that happens to have four wheels.” Adams went on: it was an electric car, but not one you would own, rather one you would subscribe to. It was a self-driving car, but also one you would summon using your smartphone for a ride-sharing trip. And it was a racecar, one that would compete in an upcoming Formula E race under the Dragon Racing team banner.

“The idea of the company is that we want to liberate everything you do when you’re with a device, how you move, how you breathe,” he said. “But in the end we’re all about liberation. Extreme liberation.” He has also said the company is also about “extreme technology.”

“It’s not the Disneyland of the internet. It’s something well beyond that, like ‘Westworld.’”

Adams also likened FF’s virtual ecosystem to HBO’s drama series about killer robots. “It’s not the Disneyland of the internet. It’s something well beyond that, like Westworld,” he said. “It could be all sorts of things wrapped up into one.”

One of the things that distinguished Faraday Future at the outset was its over-the-top promises. Executives said it would be all things to all people: a car company, an entertainment company, a mobility company, a robotics company, and so on. That philosophy remains prominent, even as the company’s financial outlook has darkened.

The tour offered to The Verge was highly staged, complete with a printed itinerary listing all the employees that would be made available for interviews. On the first floor, several camouflaged vehicles were being worked on by technicians. In the design studio, three differently shaped foam models were disguised under black shrouds. And in the parking lot, another covered production model tricked out with self-driving technology backed into a parking spot without visible human intervention. The outline of the exterior looked a lot like the prototype that many have spotted tooling around Southern California in the past few months: a low-slung crossover with large wheels.

Over the past few months, the company has teased a vehicle with a number of videos going head-to-head on a racetrack against a Bentley, a Ferrari, and a Tesla Model X. No details about the car’s 0–60 acceleration, but in each match-up, FF’s prototype emerges the victor. “You can see how that’s turned from images on a screen to a reality that people here have created,” Nick Sampson, senior vice president for engineering and the company’s public face, said during the tour. “Tangible and real.”

This was a theme that was stressed over the course of the tour: FF was a real company making a real car. Safety experts were running crash simulations, aerodynamic experts were calculating energy loss around the vehicle, and electricians were tweaking the vehicle’s powertrain. This was really happening.

On my tour, I met FF’s senior director of powertrain, Silva Hiti, who came on board after 14 years working on electric power conversion control at General Motors. She showed me the electric motors and control units that FF has been working on for its core technology, the Variable Platform Architecture (VPA) — a highly customizable chassis on which all of FF’s models will be built. It can be adjusted to accommodate extra motors or battery packs, and can be shortened or lengthened depending on the vehicle type.

By adding extra units in the VPA, Hiti says FF’s production vehicle can achieve “the performance of a supercar.” Sampson said one of FF’s electric motors pack more punch as the entire drive unit in his own personal car, a Corvette Z06.

FF says its first battery pack will exceed 100 kilowatt-hours

FF says its first battery pack will exceed 100 kilowatt-hours, which is the highest capacity battery currently available by Tesla. One former employee said the company was aiming for 120 kWh. This amount of storage should give the vehicle a range of over 300 miles on a per-charge basis. And with the scalable platform, FF is hoping to accommodate a range of vehicle types, from compact to SUV.

Out in the parking lot, I met Hong Bae, director of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and self-driving technology. We watched as one of FF’s camouflaged production models, complete with LIDAR sensors and cameras, cruised slowly around the lot before parking itself in one of the spots. Bae wouldn’t go into specifics, but he said the car would use LIDAR, radar, ultrasound, and HD cameras to guide its self-driving capabilities, including multiple layers of redundancy for safety.

But behind the appearance of normalcy, FF is a troubled enterprise. Though FF appears to be a robust American car company with hundreds of employees, interviews with former employees indicate much of what goes on at the company is dictated by Jia Yueting, the eccentric Chinese billionaire who approached Sampson in 2014 about building an electric car that could best Tesla.

Jia’s tech giant LeEco has been quietly infiltrating Silicon Valley for months. Earlier this year, it bought TV maker Vizio for a reported $2 billion. And last October, it made its big, splashy American debut, announcing its intentions to make smartphones, electric bicycles, VR headsets, and even its own electric, self-driving car, the LeSee. Soon after, he admitted to his shareholders that he was running out of money and promised to scale back his ambitions.

Observers noted that the creation of the LeSee meant LeEco was now building two electric, self-driving cars that would be in direct competition with each other. Indeed, a recent report by BuzzFeed outlined how progress at FF was hindered by the fact that LeEco was pulling engineers and designers away from FF to work on the LeSee, which sources say wasn’t even a real car.

Meanwhile, FF has sunk into a financial quagmire. As reported by BuzzFeed and Jalopnik — and confirmed by The Verge — LeEco imperiled FF’s future by leveraging the company’s assets to secure a loan for the purchase of a former Yahoo building; forensic accounts discovering $300 million in unbooked liabilities; and former employees have expressed concerns about violating the terms of the loan if LeEco and FF’s combined net worth dropped below $120 million. Several top financial executives at the company have since left, convinced the company was headed in a dangerous direction.

“The company doesn’t own the IP”

Additional reporting revealed that FF may have difficulty finding additional investors to stabilize its finances. According to former employees, FF is in effect not one, but two companies, with a separate entity based out of the Cayman Islands just for FF’s intellectual property. “If you’re an investor, you’re fucked,” one ex-executive said. “The company doesn’t own the IP.”

But another former executive disputed the notion that the separate company, FF Cayman Global, was bad for investors. “I don’t think IP being located in the Caymans is a bad thing for investors. It’s a bad thing for suppliers,” the executive said. In the event of a bankruptcy, the source said, the suppliers may not be able to file claims against the assets in an offshore entity like FF Cayman Global.

That’s a real concern, as FF’s relationship with its suppliers is currently fraught. The company recently settled a $10 million lawsuit with Futuris, its seat supplier, over breach of contract. As part of the settlement, FF will need to find a new seat supplier, a process that could take up to two years. And the seats FF plans to show off as part of its production model at CES in a few weeks aren’t seats it can legally use in future models.

A spokesperson for FF did not respond to questions about the Caymans company, nor the allegations made by former employees about financial chaos within the company.

After the tour, I asked Sampson about the company’s tenuous financial position. He ignored the larger question about viability. Instead, he cast FF as an underdog short on pedigree, but full of promise. “We haven’t got a car background we’re hanging on to, we haven’t got an internet background we’re hanging on to,” he said. “Coming from nothing, we can bridge that gap.”

Sampson embraced FF’s relationship with LeEco, and said it offered FF a competitive advantage. “China is a huge market,” he said. “We have the best of so many worlds.” Asked about Jia’s money troubles, Sampson said, “We’re partners, we each help each other,” before a press aide stepped in to reemphasize the point that FF and LeEco are “completely separate companies.”

It’s hard to take these statements at face value. Jia conceived of FF, then seeded it with his own money. If, as reports suggest, he is pulling back, FF could be left in the lurch. Much is riding on the big reveal at CES, and the construction of its $1 billion factory in Nevada, but it’s what comes after that worries observers.

In the course of my reporting I spoke to one former executive that said FF was operating on borrowed time, and without an infusion of cash soon, it could be lights out for the high-flying electric carmaker. “If they don't find money after CES,” the source said, “they will be out of money by February.”