By ZHOU Shuqi

EV maker Faraday Future Intelligent Electric Inc. (FF) has signed an agreement with the city of Huangguang in central China’s Hubei Province to set up its headquarters.

FF said on Weibo that the offices will be partly paid for by the Huanggang government, who confirmed the deal on its official WeChat account.

The FF headquarters plan does not appear in the city’s 2023 work report in which most major investments were listed. 

The EV maker in name only is yet to put a single vehicle into mass production. Founded by notorious entrepreneur JIA Yueting, FF received its second delisting warning from Nasdaq on January 10. The first warning was on October 31 last year. 

The release of FF 91 Futurist, the imagined first model of FF, has been postponed too many times to count. The company says the first batch will be delivered in April.

Hubei has been striving to make the province a hub of EV making, a number of EV makers have established plants there in recent years. 

Weltmeister Motor (WM) spent 20 billion yuan (US$3 billion) in 2018 to build a plant that was supposed to manufacture 300,000 EVs a year. Its first phase started production in 2020 but has now suspended work as WM has run out of cash.

Grove Hydrogen Automotive owned by state-owned asset IGE established a hydrogen vehicle industrial park in Huanggang last year, planning to reach an annual production of 80,000 units in six years.