Nov. 13th 2017 7:36 am

It feels like Faraday Future, once a well-funded electric car startup with over 1,000 employees, has been fading away over the last few months.

Now it looks like the end is near as the company loses several members of its top leadership again.

One thing that always impressed us about Faraday Future is its ability to attract top talent.

It has been the case since the beginning when it poached literally dozens of engineers and executives from Tesla, but also more recently even though they were already clearly in financial trouble.

We reported on them hiring Stefan Krause, a former BMW and Deutsche Bank CFO, to straighten up the company’s finances and even more recently and deeper into their financial troubles, Faraday Future also managed to hire BMW’s head of EVs, Ulrich Kranz, as its new CTO.

Now both Krause and Kranz have confirmed that they resigned from their roles at Faraday Future over the last month.

When both the CFO and CTO quit around the same time, it’s certainly not a good sign, but we also looked into other recent departures and it looks like a lot of people are jumping ship.

Another important hire, Kevin Vincent, a former Chief Counsel at NHSTA who led regulatory and safety affairs at FF, updated his LinkedIn profile earlier this month to show that he terminated his employment at the company.

Computer vision expert Khalid Yousif did the same and joined Samsung this month.

They are just a few examples of many over the last few months. Several engineers and managers ended up going to other EV startups, like Romeo Power, Byton, and Rivian Automotive.

Faraday Future, first founded by Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting and a team of “founding executives”, was operating with limited funding since Jia had his own financial troubles at his Chinese company LeEco.

Over the first few months following Krause taking over, it looked like they might be able to turn things around on a smaller scale after they abandoned their $1 billion factory project in Nevada and instead purchased an existing plant in California to produce their electric vehicles at a more reasonable volume for a first vehicle from a new company.

But now sources at the company told Electrek that the outlook is bleaker than ever at the startup. The same sources say that they are considering filing for bankruptcy or selling their remaining assets with a deal to pay their current creditors.

Electrek’s Take

While it’s disappointing to see another EV startup go away, maybe we will still see something coming out of the mess if a company, or preferably an existing automaker, decides to buy it.

Even though the company has been in financial trouble for the better part of the last 2 years, its 1,000+ employees haven’t been sitting on their hands during that time and they did develop some interesting EV technologies showcased in the FF91.

The vehicle set a new “production” EV record at Pike’s Peak – beating last year’s Tesla P90D by 20+ seconds.

Also, their latest all-electric FF91 beta prototype is pretty badass-looking. Maybe there’s something to salvage out of the company.

It could kickstart an EV program for an automaker. Anyone interested?

Featured Image: A look at Tesla Model X vs Faraday Future’s FF91

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