Disastrous EV startup pivots to $90K humanoid to stop the pain

From cash crunches to vaporizing partnerships with major manufacturers despite a multi-billion dollar valuation and shipping just a handful of vehicles over the last 12 years, Faraday Future (FF) has had an awfully rough go of building an electric car brand.

The company's trying to turn things around by shifting focus to physical AI and robotics – sort of like Tesla. The company's just unveiled a lineup of six robots it intends to produce, using a unified platform.

That includes a bunch of quadrupeds, robotic arms for industrial applications, and a flagship humanoid robot which will run you about US$90,000.

FF is calling the Futurist an 'all-in-one professional expert' that will find use in academic research. It's actually an updated model which stands 5 ft 8-in (1.72-m) tall, and now features a full-body motion control system from Nvidia, as well as a new dual-battery setup for up to 6 hours of operation.

The company says the Futurist is also designed to take on tasks like hosting and guided guests in public spaces, warehouse duties, household chores, and health support in the home.

It's worth noting that $90,000 isn't chump change even in the high-tech world of humanoids. Tesla hopes to price its Optimus robot somewhere between $20,000-$30,000, China's Unitree makes a bunch of bipeds between $6,000 and $16,000, and Palo Alto-based firm 1X began accepting pre-orders for its household bot Neo last October, with a sticker price of $20,000. The Futurist, therefore, is up at the higher end of the spectrum alongside the Unitree H1 general-purpose bot with advanced sensors and mobility.

There's also a $2,000 robot dog called Navi aimed at kids who want to learn to build physical AI systems. A higher-end $4,500 quadruped model is meant for surveilling industrial spaces, firefighting assistance, and hotel room service.

The company's also offering a series of three robotic arms for use on factory floors, in hospitals, hotel lobbies, and warehouses. They've got torsos, heads, and arms and hands like a humanoid, but move around on wheeled bases instead of two legs. FF says these are ready to deploy with advanced hardware and an industrial-grade Embodied AI platform, but hasn't said what they'll cost.

That's pretty ambitious for a company that's faced as many legal and financial hurdles as Faraday Future. It's also a major undertaking for founder Jia Yueting – who left the company after filing for billions in bankruptcy back 2019 – and made a comeback last year to revitalize the firm. It's also still keen on making electric vehicles (EV), including its FF 91 hypercar and a luxury MPV.

FF says it hopes to ship a couple of hundred units of its robot portfolio by the first half of this year. At this point, if it can actually ship any of these products, that'll honestly be a major win. It'll have its work cut out for it, given the vast number of robotics firms building humanoids in the US alone.

Source: Faraday Future