Everything about Tesla competitor Faraday Future is strange and confusing

(Screenshot via Faraday Future)

Faraday Future first popped onto our radar a few months back, and we dutifully pointed out that all the "Tesla killer" buzz around the mysterious company was misguided.

Tesla would be delighted if another new carmaker could make a go of it, especially an all-electric carmaker. For Tesla, it isn't encouraging if Elon Musk and his team are operating in a market of one.

We reached out to Faraday immediately after we first heard about the company, but we didn't learn much.

More recently, we reached out to Faraday again for some additional insight into its plans, but we haven't heard back.

Since Faraday Future left stealth mode in July, however, we have gathered a bit more insight as information has trickled out.

Various anonymous sources, Fortune and other outlets have reported, say Faraday Future is owned a Chinese media firm, LeTV, and that it has hundreds of employees and billions of dollars to spend, and is shopping for a manufacturing facility in the US.

The company also says it will start delivering cars by 2017, according to comments the company made to Road & Track in July.

Oh, and there were rumors that Faraday Future (named for 19th-century English scientist Michael Faraday) is a front for whatever Apple is doing with its Apple Car, or Project Titan.

Start making sense?

None of this makes much sense. But if you're observing from the outside, you can see that what Faraday has been putting out bears some resemblance with what Apple is doing on its car project. This leads one to conclude that there are perhaps two main ways of launching a new car company.

The first — exemplified by Tesla and Google — parallels the way the traditional auto industry works. Essentially, build a car, drive it around, and sell it. Tesla followed this playbook transparently. Google has a new wrinkle on the same thing: building a fleet of self-driving cars to test and perfect autonomous technologies related to transportation.

(Google)
The Google Car.

The second is exemplified by Apple and Faraday Future and parallels the way many tech businesses are run: in secret.

In fact, the idea is to be so secretive that whatever you're doing eventually stops making sense. For example, if Apple is building a car, it's tackling the challenge in a way people in the auto industry find intriguing but also baffling. Apple is making odd executive hires and treating the whole process as if it's reverse-engineering alien UFO tech in clandestine labs.

And to what end? To create a machine that will probably have four wheels and carrying kids to soccer games on weekends.