Marco della Cava

USA TODAY

LAS VEGAS – Call it CES’ favorite parlor game. Was Faraday Future’s grand event here Monday the coming out party for a new heavy hitter on the automotive scene, or a brilliantly conjured smokescreen for existing tech giant Apple?

That delicious morsel of pure conjecture has been circulating almost since Los Angeles-based Faraday sneaked onto the scene in earnest last year, just as rumors of Apple’s interest in building a car gained momentum.

As many reports have noted, Apple has been hiring auto experts at a rapid clip from companies such as Tesla. So has Faraday, whose head of engineering, Nick Sampson, held a similar position at Tesla.

Apple has about $200 billion in cash reserves that it would do well to re-invest wisely, and where better than in the rapidly evolving and tech-driven automotive space. And clearly Faraday must have deep pockets, given that in two years it has hired about 750 auto veterans and, as announced last fall, plans to build a $1 billion manufacturing plant north of here.

That admittedly could be explained away by the fact that Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting and other investors are behind Faraday, news that came out when Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval announced that his state would become the location for Faraday’s new factory.

End of rumor? Perhaps. But then came Monday’s event. As a veteran of years of Apple product shindigs, my alarms started going off.

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First of all, for a new company without a single product, the Faraday PR staff successfully managed to whip the media into an invitation-only frenzy, luring them to a normally vacant lot that many Las Vegas cab drivers couldn’t find. There, a white tent emblazoned with the double-F Faraday Future logo welcomed guests. Once inside, the room was bathed in purple light and house music kept the energy high.

Sure, this could simply be an astute new company understanding that the script for successful product launches was written by Apple, so why not copy it.

But then the event unfolded, and I couldn’t help but scratch my head. The point of the event was to pull the cover off a prototype vehicle, which one presumed might be a svelte Tesla Model S competitor or something else equally commercially viable. Instead, we got the FF Zero 1, a space-age 1,000-hp electric hyper-car that is about as practical as, well, a 1,000-hp $1.4-million Ferrari La Ferrari.

That’s when I got my first whiff of that old magician’s ruse: look into this hand because the trick’s happening in the other.

Other things suddenly bugged me. For a company that’s about to spend a billion to build a factory, why hasn’t it trotted out a CEO? If the factory’s breaking ground now and a car is due out in a few years, why not today showcase a stunning connected-electric-self-driving-latte-making vision of automotive beauty we can all lust after? Instead, we got a Batmobile sibling that none of us is likely to ever order or drive. Not even this one: I was told the cool video of the car in action was an animation.

On stage, and later in one on one interviews, Faraday’s execs were wildly amiable while being noticeably unspecific. There was a lot of talk about changing the future of mobility, but no roadmap. The smokescreen argument started to waft into view.

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No one that I chewed this over with from the auto world wanted to go on the record with their opinions on this matter. But suffice to say everything from the lack of a CEO to the odd super car prototype had many positing that either Faraday was led by an optimistic group of billionaires or, as one industry person said, “it’s Apple hiding in plain sight.”

Fair point. Consider that you can barely build a tech gadget – cue Apple Watch – in secret without the Internet leaking the news eventually, so imagine hiding a car company?

Houdini famously vanished an elephant in his theater show. Tim Cook could well be Houdini here, and Faraday Future may be his elephant, an awkwardly named version of an imminent iCar. Who knows? But thanks for playing.

Della Cava writes about tech for USA TODAY. Follow him at CES all week @marcodellacava.