22—Cleveland Daily Banner—Wednesday, January 6, 2016
www.clevelandbanner.com
Faraday Future reveals sleek,
sporty concept car in Vegas
LAS VEGAS (AP) — The automotive future according to a new
electric car maker looks an awful
lot like a Corvette crossed with
the Batmobile.
California-based
Faraday
Future debuted its sleek electric
concept racecar Monday night
during the annual CES show
that focuses on consumer gadgets and has increasingly become
a way for carmakers to show off
their latest technological feats.
The 18-month-old company
that has remained much of a
mystery until recently revealing
its primary backer, Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting, won $335
million worth of incentives from
the state of Nevada last month to
build a $1 billion manufacturing
facility in a hard-hit Las Vegas
suburb.
Not even Nevada Gov. Brian
Sandoval, who pushed for the
incentive package and attended
Monday’s debut, had seen the
concept car. Neither had North
Las Vegas Mayor John Lee
although he visited the California
headquarters four months ago
and saw “the intelligence building around the car.”
“There was no doubt about it
that that was the exclamation
point,” he said, referring to the
negotiations to land the manufacturing plant in his city. He
was convinced, he said.
Emphasizing the speed at
which it will develop and build
cars, the company’s Senior Vice
President of Research and
Development Nick Sampson said
the company would deliver its
first production car in a couple of
years.
Sampson said Faraday had so
far hired 750 people globally with
most at its California headquarters and planned to break
ground on its North Las Vegas
plant in a few weeks with plans
to hire 4,500 people there.
He said his company would
utilize digital design and testing
of parts and modular construction, making it quicker than
competitors.
“You don’t need to have a hundred year legacy in the automotive industry to define what the
next generation of transportation
needs to look and feel like,”
Sampson said, taking a stab at
traditional car makers and likening the future of cars to the
debut of the Apple iPhone nine
years ago making several models
of cell phones obsolete.
But Sampson wasn’t saying
what the company would build
first for production, how much
it’s spent so far and also wasn’t
revealing much more information
about the company’s investors.
The company is still shopping for
a battery supplier, he said.
The presentation included
Ding Lei, co-founder of LETV
described as the Netflix of China,
who said afterward that his company intends to partner with
Faraday on research and development.
The road to make a profitable
electric car company hasn’t been
easy for one of the most wellknown in the marketplace. Tesla
has only made a quarterly profit
once since its 2003 founding.
And traditional automakers
have been utilizing modular
design and augmented reality in
development for years.
Sampson said the difference is
that Faraday will be designing
only electric cars unlike other
car-makers that might have to
spend more time redesigning a
model to fit a hybrid engine, V6
or V8.
“We’re developing one core
motor technology,” Sampson
said.
ap photo
the FFzero1 by Faraday Future is displayed at CES Unveiled, a media preview event for CES
International Monday in Las Vegas. The high-performance electric concept car was unveiled during a
news conference by Faraday Future.
The
company
dubbed
Monday’s debut that included a
clear fin running half the length
of the car, a single-line of a smile
for a headlight and a white interior with a seat inspired by NASA
design the FFZero1.
The low-profile waist-high car
remained under a white sheet,
the centerpiece on a white stage
in front of white curtains for
most of Monday’s night’s presentation inside a large tent packed
with people and press waiting for
the reveal.
“It’s an extreme tablet on
wheels,” said Richard Kim,
Faraday’s head of global design,
saying the concept included the
ability to project images on the
road much like a “digital copilot,”
a smart phone dock in the steering wheel, tunnels below the car
to funnel air through and a
designed horizontal crease along
the sides of the car he called the
“UFO” line to signal the car was
otherworldly.
It’s a “car of concepts,” he said
rather than a concept car.
Wendell Castle’s furniture fuses craft, high-tech General Motors invests
NEW YORK (AP) — Sometimes
a chair is not just a chair, but a
softly organic, cantilevered form,
perhaps sprouting a leaf to one
side.
A table can resemble a voluptuous jungle plant brought from
an alien planet.
A bench becomes an inviting
squid resting on delicately
rounded tentacle legs.
Wendell Castle, 83, sometimes
dubbed the father — or grandfather — of the American art furniture movement, has, throughout
his 57-year career, employed creative new techniques in works
that are both sculpture and furniture.
Now, in “Wendell Castle
Remastered,” the Museum of
Arts and Design explores Castle’s
most recent, digitally crafted
pieces. The show will remain on
view through Feb. 28.
In what sometimes resembles
a forest out of a Dr. Seuss book,
Castle’s latest works are displayed side-by-side with his earliest ones, which inspired them.
“Even though my work has an
element that is a seat or a desk,
it also has other elements that
have nothing to do with any
function. But it’s a set. They go
together,” the artist is quoted as
saying in the exhibit catalog.
Says Ronald T. Labaco, who
curated the show: “He loves the
idea of planting a furniture seed
that sprouts into a chair or lamp
or table.”
Earlier works featured include
some of Castle’s pieces from the
1950s and ‘60s, when he was an
innovator in the process of stack
lamination: He built forms from
carefully sized and stacked
wood, and then honed them by
hand to create eye-popping
organic pieces.
Some of the earliest works in
the exhibit include spindly
sculptural pieces made from
gunstocks, including “Scribe’s
Stool,” which helped launch
Castle’s career. It was first exhibited at this museum, then called
the Museum of Contemporary
Crafts, and so has come full circle. After seeing the chair in
1962, the dean of fine and
applied arts at the Rochester
Institute of Technology invited
Castle to be a professor of furniture design, a position that
allowed him access to the facilities he needed to grow and
experiment as an artist. Castle
still lives and works in the
Rochester, New York, area.
His sculptural approach to
furniture has evolved in recent
years, when Castle has combined
his handcraftsmanship with the
latest in robotics, including an
enormous milling robot named
Mr. Chips.
In his latest works, carving,
rasping and finishing techniques
are combined with digital techniques like 3-D scanning, 3-D
modeling and computer-controlled milling.
“It is nothing short of astonishing that he is now making
some of the best work of his long
career, work that attests to the
value of deep expertise and experience,” says Glenn Adamson, a
director of the museum.
Many of the more recent pieces
feature cone-shaped forms,
stacked or layered, with results
that Castle says are too complex
to have been realized using his
earlier method of stacked lamination.
$500 million in Lyft,
forms a partnership
ap photo
tWo bronze sculptures and
combined outdoor public seating,
part of the Wendell Castle
Remastered exhibit, are installed
in front of the Museum of Art and
Design, in New York. The museum show explores the recent
work of Wendell Castle, 83,
sometimes called the father (or
grandfather) of the American art
furniture movement for pieces
that are both sculpture and furniture.
ap photo
“runaWay,” left, and “Like a
Dream,” part of the Wendell
Castle Remastered exhibit, are
displayed at the Museum of Art
and Design, in New York.
ap photos
“Squid chair no. 1,” right,
part of the Wendell Castle
Remastered exhibit, is displayed
at the Museum of Art and Design,
in New York. The museum show
explores the recent work of
Wendell Castle, 83, sometimes
called the father (or grandfather)
of the American art furniture
movement for pieces that are
both sculpture and furniture.
“Walnut Sculpture,”
“Scribe’s Stool,” and “Stool,” from
left, part of the Wendell Castle
Remastered exhibit, are displayed at the Museum of Art and
Design, in New York.
DETROIT (AP) — The automotive industry is placing its
biggest bet yet that using a
device to hail a ride — with or
without a driver — is the
future of transportation.
General Motors Co. said
Monday it is investing $500
million in ride-hailing company Lyft Inc. and forming an
unprecedented partnership
that could eventually lead to
on-demand, self-driving cars.
It’s the largest investment yet
by a traditional automaker in
a new mobility company, and
is an acknowledgement by
GM that the transportation
landscape is changing fast.
“We see the world of mobility changing more in the next
five years than it has in the
last 50,” GM President Dan
Ammann told The Associated
Press.
GM made the investment
as part of a $1 billion round
of fundraising by Lyft.
Together, the companies
plan to open a network of
U.S. hubs where Lyft drivers
can rent GM vehicles at discounted rates. That could
expand Lyft’s business by
giving people who don’t own
cars a way to drive and earn
money through Lyft. It also
gives GM a leg up on competitors like Daimler AG and
Ford Motor Co., who are
developing their own ridesharing services. And it
would put more young drivers behind the wheel of a
Chevrolet, Buick, GMC or
Cadillac.
Longer term, GM and Lyft
will work together to develop
a fleet of autonomous vehicles
that city dwellers could summon using Lyft’s mobile app.
Partnering with GM could
give Lyft a boost o ver its
archrival, Uber Technologies
Inc., which is working on its
own driverless cars.
Karl Brauer, an industry
analyst with Kelley Blue
Book, expects to see
automakers and tech companies form more partnerships
over the next few months.
“Each one has an area of
specialization to make both of
them stronger,” he said.
GM isn’t the only automaker with an eye on Lyft.
Fontinalis Partners — a venture capital firm co-founded
by Ford Motor Co.’s Executive
Chairman Bill Ford — invested in Lyft last May. The
amount invested wasn’t disclosed.
GM gets a seat on Lyft’s
board and access to the
three-year-old
company’s
software, which matches riders with drivers and automates payments. The partnership also better positions
the automaker for a future in
which customers don’t buy
cars every five or six years
but share rides or hail drivers
when they need to get somewhere.
San Francisco-based Lyft
gets the expertise of a 108-
year-old automaker with
decades of experience in
making connected and
autonomous
vehicles.
Detroit-based GM also has an
enviable global reach; it sells
almost 10 million cars each
year in more than 100 countries. Lyft operates in 190
U.S. cities, although it
recently formed partnerships
with ride-sharing services in
China and India.
Lyft
co-founder
and
President John Zimmer and
GM President Dan Ammann
say the two companies began
serious discussions about
three months ago. Both executives see big changes coming in the traditional model of
car ownership, and they had
similar ideas about how to
address it.
“It felt very natural very
quickly,” Zimmer said.
Ammann said the resulting
partnership is unlike any
other in the auto and tech
industries.
“Do we want to deploy the
resources and people to do
everything ourselves, or get
there faster by working in
partnership?” Ammann said.
“We see a really compelling,
complimentary set of capabilities.”
GM has made previous forays into the ride-sharing
world. In 2011, GM invested
$3 million in RelayRides and
teamed up to let GM owners
rent their cars to other drivers through the OnStar connectivity system. GM and
RelayRides cut ties last year
when RelayRides — now Turo
— rebranded itself as a longterm car-sharing company,
GM spokesman Dave Roman
said.
Some automakers are
going
alone.
Daimler’s
Car2Go rents out tiny Smart
cars in 28 European and U.S.
cities. BMW is experimenting
with renting out electric cars
through its Drive Now service. Apple and Tesla are also
believed to be developing
their own autonomous software
and
ride-sharing
schemes.
Others are forming partnerships. Ford, for example,
encourages owners in a
handful of U.S. cities to rent
cars through Getaround, a
car-sharing service. Google,
which is testing a small fleet
of driverless cars, invested
$250 million in Uber in 2013.
Following its latest round
of fundraising — which also
included a $100 million
investment from Saudi
Arabia’s Kingdom Holding
Co. — privately held Lyft set
its value at $5.5 billion. The
company expects revenue of
around $1 billion this year.
By comparison, GM is valued
at $53 billion and had $153
billion in revenue in 2014.
GM’s shares fell 2 percent
to $33.31 on Monday. The
major U.S. indices were all
down more than 1.5 percent.