While Tesla’s some of the competitors include BMW and Mercedes-Benz, there are also some startups that are poaching engineering and management talent from Tesla and using it to challenge the automaker.
Atieva, among those start-ups, just recently revealed strategies to launch a luxury EV sedan called Edna within two years. The company, whose Chief Technology Officer is Peter Rawlinson, originally led the engineering of Tesla’s Model S, is moneyed by a range of investors, amongst them Beijing Auto and LeEco.
Another Tesla rival hopeful, Faraday Future, also based in California, like Tesla and Atieva, is moneyed by Jia. The company, which has announced strategies to start production of its EV in the U.S., just recently grabbed top Ferrari supervisor Marco Mattiacci to oversee everything from branding to sales and customer experience. Faraday Future, like Atieva, does not yet have a vehicle all set for mass production, but it’s in the procedure of constructing a plant in Nevada where it will develop its FFZero1.
2 other new companies that have substantial involvement from Jia Yueting and other Chinese sources of financing are NextEV and LeSEE. In fact, the latter is a development of Jia, an unit of his corporation LeEco.
Chinese firms are investing so heavily in this industry is no coincidence or the most recent example of the Chinese joining the most recent trend. The U.S. and China are the two biggest markets for EVs. Markets that are still new and offering good opportunities.
