Jia Yueting has not stopped tinkering with smart cars.
Jia Yueting
A few days ago, he stood under the lights of a Los Angeles press conference, his fingertips brushing the cool metal body of FX Super One. A giant screen named "Super EAI FACE" was playing gorgeous dynamic totems in a loop, reflecting the light and shadows in his eyes. Someone in the audience raised his mobile phone, and the moment the flash light came on, he seemed to see those burning eyes when FF 91 debuted eight years ago.
At this moment, the barrage of comments in the live broadcast room was surging - "Can the deposit be refunded?" "Will you return to China next week?" - like fine needles, piercing into this drama called "Subverting Escalade".
When the FX Super One slowly drove onto the booth, the most dazzling thing was not the laser, but the 1.5-meter-wide LED screen on the front. Officials claimed that it could customize expressions, play advertisements and even camping movies, trying to reshape the "language of communication between people and cars." However, during the demonstration, the insufficient resolution caused the edges of the patterns to be blurred, and the switching of animations was as jerky as an old projector.
In fact, the so-called "Super EAI FACE system" and "embodied intelligence 6×4 architecture" and other new technologies at the press conference only piled up concepts such as AI interaction and multimodal perception, but did not show actual scene verification videos. Compared with Huawei's ADS 4.0, which has achieved city navigation in the Mengshi M817, or Tesla FSD V12's shadow mode data accumulation, FF's EAI Driving only stays on the hardware list description of "LiDAR + 11 cameras".
Even more embarrassing is that the screen was found to have inherent defects in the heat dissipation design. An engineer said in an anonymous interview: "If the screen is on for two hours in high temperature outdoors, it will trigger the overheat protection." Jia Yueting claimed that he wanted to "end the homogenization of front faces", but an industry engineer pointed out: "Replacing the grille with a screen has long been tried by HiPhi and Ideal, and the heat dissipation and cost issues have not been solved, so how can it be subversive?"
If the screen on the front of the car is covered, it is not difficult for industry insiders to find that the outline of the FX Super One is almost identical to that of the Great Wall Wei brand Alpine. The side window angle, waistline curvature and even taillight details are more than 90% similar. Industry insiders speculate that FF may circumvent the patent through "import modification" - importing the Alpine vehicle into the United States, replacing the front face and the car machine, and then selling it under a brand name.
"10,034 orders were received within one hour." When the screen popped up this line of golden numbers, Jia Yueting's tone suddenly became excited. But a closer look at the terms: the C-end deposit is only $100, which can be refunded at any time; the so-called 4,800 B-end orders came from car rental companies and e-commerce platforms, and although they advertised "non-refundable deposits", no contract documents were displayed.
Just three months ago, FF 91 set a record of $21.9 million in net losses per vehicle, with less than 30 vehicles delivered in eight years. Even Wall Street analysts would probably shake their heads when they see this jump from "single-digit annual deliveries" to "more than 10,000 orders per day."
The capital market reacted even more fiercely. Three days before the press conference, FF announced that it had received a $105 million transfusion from Middle Eastern capital. Just 24 hours later, the US Securities and Exchange Commission issued a "Wells Notice" to it, accusing Jia Yueting and his senior executives of making false statements in the 2021 IPO financing.
Jia Yueting defines FX Super One as "the species that ends the Escalade era", but the Escalade IQ starts at $130,000 and focuses on the hardcore luxury of a full-size SUV; while the Super One, priced at $80,000, attacks the business market with an MPV body. Lindsay Brewer, a North American automotive columnist, mentioned in his article: "It tries to be a nanny car, a red carpet car and a family SUV at the same time, but the result is like playing football in a tuxedo."
The FF Hanford plant was silent at night except for the FX Super One shining brightly under the spotlight. The annual production capacity was once planned to be 10,000 vehicles, but now the monthly output is less than single digit.
Over the past eight years, China's new energy market has grown from a policy cradle to a bloody ocean, but Jia Yueting's car-making narrative is still stuck in the bold statement on the PPT that he would "reconstruct the global automotive industry."
"Ecosystem" was once Jia Yueting's favorite word, but the collapse of LeEco's seven sub-ecosystems has become a classic business failure. 360 founder Zhou Hongyi once sharply criticized: "Mr. Jia's ecosystem is a fake ecosystem... Ecosystem cannot be created by seven or eight business units of a company."
Now Super One has mentioned the "closed loop of user operation ecology" and even brought out the philosophical expression of "reconstructing the relationship between people and cars", which inevitably evokes the market's traumatic memories. When Xiaomi SU7, another technology company that crosses over to car manufacturing, delivered 100,000 units in three months with the "full ecology of people, cars and homes", FF's ecological story is still on paper with 4,800 B-end orders.
From FF 91 to FX Super One, Jia Yueting's car-making story has always been torn between "disrupting the future" and "realizing the present". In eight years, China's new energy market has completed the transformation from policy-driven to technological involution, while FF is still trapped in the quagmire of production capacity and capital survival.
Business legends are ultimately written by screws on an assembly line. Will anyone spend the next eight years to pay for this 580,000 yuan "dream"?