Faraday Future unveiled its FF 91 electric car at a special event held during the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week.
It’s a crossover-utility vehicle with a claimed 1,050 horsepower and 378-mile range, the latter courtesy of a 130-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack.
Aside from those ambitious performance claims, the FF 91 has fairly extroverted styling, with bulging fenders, a low roof line, and a grille-free front fascia that advertises the car’s electric powertrain.
DON’T MISS: Faraday Future unveils FF 91, its first production electric car; deposits open, no price given
Despite all of that, Faraday Future’s first production car has a fairly nondescript name.
But the FF 91 name was chosen for specific reasons, Faraday Future senior vice president of R&D Nick Sampson said in a recent interview with Motor1.
The FF part stands for Faraday Future, which isn’t much of a shock.
Faraday Future FF 91
The number, meanwhile, represents the FF 91’s place in the company’s lineup, assuming Faraday Future goes on to build additional models.
The first number indicates the car’s size and price range, with 9 being the highest on a scale created by the automaker—broadly analogous to the top-of-the-range Genesis G90 or Volvo S90 sedans, say.
Meanwhile, the second number represents the version of a given model.
ALSO SEE: Faraday Future falls further: two execs depart, CES car still due (Dec 2016)
So the FF 91 is the first version of Faraday Future’s largest and most expensive car.
Its successor would theoretically be called the FF 92, and smaller or lower-price models could possibly wear designations like FF 81 or FF 71.
Even the FFZero1 supercar concept Faraday unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2016 follows this pattern.
Faraday Future FF 91
Faraday is planning a low-volume halo model that would get the “0” designation, R&D senior vice president Sampson said.
That means the first version of that car would be the FF 01, representing only a variation on spelling from the name used for the concept car.
Sampson said Faraday chose this alphanumeric code because it avoids the need to find real words that convey the same meaning across multiple languages.
MORE: Faraday Future Shows FFZero1 Concept, But What Did We Learn? (Jan 2016)
German luxury brands pioneered the use of alphanumeric designations in place of traditional names, but the practice has become more widespread, and is currently employed by automakers from Cadillac to Mazda.
However, the name of Faraday Future’s electric car won’t matter much if the company is unable to get it into production.
At the end of 2016, Faraday lost two high-profile executives, and construction work for its Nevada assembly plant is presently at a standstill.
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