Faraday Future Strikes a Deal with China's Top Auto Group as It Readies for a Wall Street Debut

Sarah Favot

Favot is an award-winning journalist and adjunct instructor at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She previously was an investigative and data reporter at national education news site The 74 and local news site LA School Report. She's also worked at the Los Angeles Daily News. She was a Livingston Award finalist in 2011 and holds a Master's degree in journalism from Boston University and BA from the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.

Faraday Future Strikes a Deal with China's Top Auto Group as It Readies for a Wall Street Debut

A day after luxury electric carmaker Faraday Future said it will go public, it announced a new partnership with China's largest privately-owned automotive group that could help it produce cars in China.

Gardena-based Faraday Future said Thursday it will merge with a special purpose acquisition corporation, or SPAC, Property Solutions Acquisition Corp., a deal which will value the combined company at around $3.4 billion and will raise about $1 billion, the company said in its announcement.


On Friday, the automaker made public that it had signed a cooperation agreement with Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, one of its minority investors. The companies will explore the possibility of using production services provided by a joint venture between Geely and Foxconn, a Taiwanese electronics contract manufacturer. Geely will also provide technology and engineering support to Faraday.

Bill Russo, founder and CEO of Shanghai-based Automobility, said Geely, which owns Volvo, has recently made several investments to build a portfolio around a new mobility-related platform.

"This is a full range transportation equipment ecosystem that Geely is building and Faraday completes part of the puzzle," Russo said.

Neither company provided more specifics about the partnership, but Reuters reported that Faraday plans to set up a new base in China. In a statement, Geely said new details will be "announced at a later date."

Faraday Future becomes the latest company in a wave of electric vehicle makers to go public through a merger with a SPAC, including Canoo, Fisker, Lordstown Motors and Nikola.

The merger is expected to fully fund the production of Faraday's luxury electric vehicle, the FF 91, within a year of the close of the transaction and will help the company finish construction of its factory in Hanford, California. No vehicles have been produced so far.

"This is an important milestone in our company's transformation,," Faraday Future Global CEO Carsten Breitfeld said in announcing the SPAC. "I am excited that this business combination will allow us to launch the class defining FF 91, building upon the founder's original vision to help our users and shareholders take part in shaping the future of mobility."

About $230 million of the proceeds from the merger is expected to come from the money raised by Property Solutions in its SPAC. The remaining $775 million will come from a private placement in public equity, or PIPE, investment.

After the merger is complete, it will be listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker symbol "FFIE."

Analysts say the demand for electric vehicles will continue to grow as regulators crack down on emissions. The Biden administration has pledged to help develop an electric vehicle charging infrastructure as part of a jobs proposal for the automotive industry. Biden also said this week he wants to replace the government's fleet of 650,000 vehicles with electric models. And in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered all new cars and passenger trucks sold in California be zero-emission by 2035.

General Motors said Thursday it will stop production of gasoline-powered cars, trucks and SUVs by 2035 and shift its entire new fleet to zero-emission vehicles.

Faraday has faced some financial challenges since it launched in 2014 with a stated ambition to overtake Tesla.

Chinese technology mogul Jia Yueting, who founded the company, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2019, which was completed in July.

Yueting stepped down from his role as CEO is now serving as the chief product and ecosystem officer at the company.

Breitfeld is a former BMW executive who took the helm in 2019.

Faraday expects to sell more than 400,000 vehicles over the next five years, saying its FF 91 has received 14,000 reservations.

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NASA’s JPL Receives Billions to Begin Understanding Our Solar System

Samson Amore

Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.

NASA’s JPL Receives Billions to Begin Understanding Our Solar System
Evan Xie

NASA’s footprint in California is growing as the agency prepares for Congress to approve its proposed 2024 budget.

The overall NASA budget swelled 6% from the prior year, JPL deputy director Larry James told dot.LA. He added he sees that as a continuation of the last two presidential administrations’ focus on modernizing and bolstering the nation’s space program.

The money goes largely to existing NASA centers in California, including the Pasadena-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory run with Caltech, Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley and Armstrong Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base.

California remains a hotspot for NASA space activity and investment. In 2021, the agency estimated its economic output impact on the region to be around $15.2 billion. That was far more than its closest competing states, including Texas ($9.3 billion) and Maryland (roughly $8 billion). That same year, NASA reported it employed over 66,000 people in California.

“In general, Congress has been very supportive” of the JPL and NASA’s missions, James said. “It’s generally bipartisan [and] supported by both sides of the aisle. In the last few years in general NASA has been able to have increased budgets.”

There are 41 current missions run by JPL and CalTech, and another 16 scheduled for the future. James added the new budget is “an incredible support for all the missions we want to do.”

The public-private partnership between NASA and local space companies continues to evolve, and the increased budget could be a boon for LA-based developers. Numerous contractors for NASA (including CalTech, which runs the JPL), Boeing, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX and Northrop Grumman all stand to gain new contracts once the budget is finalized, partly because NASA simply needs the private industry’s help to achieve all its goals.

James said that there was only one JPL mission that wasn’t funded – a mission to send an orbital satellite to survey the surface and interior of Venus, called VERITAS.

NASA Employment and Output ImpactEvan Xie

The Moon and Mars

Much of the money earmarked in the proposed 2024 budget is for crewed missions. Overall, NASA’s asking for $8 billion from Congress to fund lunar exploration missions. As part of this, the majority is earmarked for the upcoming Artemis mission, which aims to land a woman and person of color on the Moon’s south pole.

While there’s a number of high-profile missions the JPL is working on that are focused on Mars, including Mars Sample Return project (which received $949 million in this proposed budget) and Ingenuity helicopter and Perseverance rover, JPL also received significant funding to study the Earth’s climate and behavior.

JPL also got funding for several projects to map our universe. One is the SphereX Near Earth Objects surveyor mission, the goal of which is to use telescopes to “map the entire universe,” James said, adding that the mission was fully funded.

International Space Station

NASA’s also asking for more money to maintain the International Space Station (ISS), which houses a number of projects dedicated to better understanding the Earth’s climate and behavior.

The agency requested roughly $1.3 billion to maintain the ISS. It also is increasing its investment in space flight support, in-space transportation and commercial development of low-earth orbit (LEO). “The ISS is an incredible platform for us,” James said.

James added there are multiple missions outside or on board the ISS now taking data, including EMIT, which launched in July 2022. The EMIT mission studies arid dust sources on the planet using spectroscopy. It uses that data to remodel how mineral dust movement in North and South America might affect the Earth’s temperature changes.

Another ISS mission JPL launched is called ECOSTRESS. The mission sent a thermal radiometer onto the space station in June 2018 to monitor how plants lose water through their leaves, with the goal of figuring out how the terrestrial biosphere reacts to changes in water availability. James said the plan is to “tell you the kind of foliage health around the globe” from space.

One other ISS project is called Cold Atom Lab. It is “an incredible fundamental physics machine,” James said, that’s run by “three Nobel Prize winners as principal investigators on the Space Station.” Cold Atom Lab is a physics experiment geared toward figuring out how quantum phenomena behave in space by cooling atoms with lasers to just below absolute zero degrees.

In the long term, James was optimistic NASA’s imaging projects could lead to more dramatic discoveries. Surveying the makeup of planets’ atmospheres is a project “in the astrophysics domain we’re very excited about,” James said. He added that this imaging could lead to information about life on other planets, or, at the very least, an understanding of why they’re no longer habitable.

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samsonamore@dot.la

Behind Her Empire: Margaret Wishingrad On Creating A Low Sugar Cereal Brand

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

Behind Her Empire: Margaret Wishingrad On Creating A Low Sugar Cereal Brand
Provided by BHE

On this episode of Behind Her Empire, Three Wishes founder and CEO Margaret Wishingrad talks about creating brand awareness and shares the key component to running a successful business.

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If Angelenos Don’t Seize the Curb, They Risk Losing Sidewalk Dining

Maylin Tu
Maylin Tu is a freelance writer who lives in L.A. She writes about scooters, bikes and micro-mobility. Find her hovering by the cheese at your next local tech mixer.
Connie Llanos, Jordan Justus and Gene Oh
Justin Janes, Vizeos Media

Three years ago, Los Angeles went into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, cities like L.A. are struggling to hold on to pandemic-era transportation and infrastructure changes, like sidewalk dining and slow streets, while managing escalating demand for curb space from rideshare and delivery.

At Curbivore, a conference dedicated to “commerce at the curb” held earlier this month in downtown Los Angeles, the topic was “Grading on a Curb: The State of our Streets & Cities in 2023,” a panel moderated by Drew Grant, editorial director for dot.LA.

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