Faraday Future, the still-mysterious EV company, has opened up about how it intends to develop a variety of cars: through a modular and easily adaptable platform.
As last week was Tesla’s meticulously planned time to shine with the final piece in its ‘master plan’: the unveil of their Model 3, Faraday Future also revealed some interesting news.
Where previously nobody really knew what they were about nor what exactly they planned on building, save for the FFZERO1 concept they revealed at the 2016 Cosumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the company has shed more light on how it intends to bring a variety of advanced EVs to market.
The video shows what will be underpinning their next few cars. This new VPA, or Variable Platform Architecture, due to its modularity by design, would theoretically allow them to easily adapt the platform to many different types of vehicle.
By arranging batteries into ‘strings’, they’re able to make the wheelbase either longer or shorter. With that defining the length of the car, the VPA also allows for different ride heights and configurations of electric motor: single motor on either axle, one motor per axle, or even four motors with one for each wheel.
These are kinds of engineering and packaging solutions that are just not feasible with regular internal combustion cars as electric vehicles have far fewer components that are necessary for mobility.
A loftier ambition is FF’s vision is to have autonomous technology baked into their platform architecture, designed to be compatible as more advanced versions of sensor and more computing power becomes available over time.
You’d be forgiven for not having heard about Faraday Future, the small but intriguing California-based company that is bent on making its mark in the electric vehicle market. They caused a bit of a stir by making some high profile hires from top automotive brands, technology companies, and even Tesla.
Many parallels have been drawn between the two companies, and rightly so, with even their names both being derived from prominent scientists of the past (Nikola Tesla and Michael Faraday, respectively).
Faraday Future’s FFZERO1 concept was a single-seat racer that they claim has over 1,000hp (746kW) of power and a top speed of over 321km/h, with drive coming from four ‘quad core motors’.
It too sits on what we now know as FF’s Variable Platform Architecture.
