When we reported on NIO’s new all-electric and autonomous concept last week, some of you pointed out how it looks similar to Faraday Future’s own FF91 concept unveiled at CES earlier this year.

As it turns out, Faraday seems to agree since an executive referred to NIO’s EVE concept as a ‘poor clone’. They even created the picture above to show it.

Nick Sampson, SVP of R&D and Engineering at Faraday Future and a former Tesla executive, made the comment on Twitter last week and released the picture:

"Imitation is the highest form of flattery, but poor clones get it wrong because we are promoting individuality"​ https://t.co/lCFMwySQlo — Nick Sampson (@NickSampsonFF) March 11, 2017

Both vehicles are all-electric and feature autonomous capabilities, but we are are talking about the design here.

NIO’s EVE on the left and Faraday Future’s FF91 on the right:

The overall shapes of the cars are certainly similar, but the fascia are quite different.

As for the backends, there are definitely some similarities:

Where things get more complicated is that those two concepts were first unveiled 3 months apart.

NIO has a prototype of the EVE at SXSW, which we will check out this week for a closer look, and it’s hard to believe that they would have managed to turn around a full-scale prototype within 3 months of Faraday Future unveiling the FF91.

Sampson has an answer for that. He suggests that the design of the FF91 “leaked” and that would explain how they managed to “clone” it so fast:

@FredericLambert Yes Really…the design language is so similar.. and the wheels! ..our design was settled well over a year ago… leaks!! — Nick Sampson (@NickSampsonFF) March 11, 2017

That’s quite the accusation. Also interesting that they “settled” on the design “well over a year ago”. That would place that before the unveiling of Faraday’s FFZERO1 concept.

Both FF and NIO are literally years away from bringing their vehicles to market, but it seems that there’s already a rivalry brewing between the two.

What do you think? Is the NIO EVE a “clone” of the FF91? Let us know in the comment section below.

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