So CES wrapped up in Vegas this week and everybody's already moved on to writing up their "best of" lists, but the thing I can't stop thinking about isn't a TV or a fridge that argues with you. It's Faraday Future's car not parking itself.
Quick recap if you missed it: Faraday Future, the mysterious California EV startup bankrolled by LeEco's Jia Yueting, used the big pre-CES press night on Tuesday to unveil the FF 91, an electric SUV they're claiming does 0-60 in 2.39 seconds and puts out over 1,000 horsepower. Big numbers. Genuinely big numbers, if true. They also showed off a self-parking demo, the kind of thing that gets pre-loaded into a keynote specifically because it's supposed to be the applause moment.
It did not get applause. The car just sort of sat there, then crept forward a little, then stopped again, while the guy on stage kept talking like it was definitely about to work any second now. Eventually they cut away. Faraday Future's line afterward was that the wifi in the room was too congested with a few thousand journalists' phones for the car to talk to its own sensors properly, which, fine, maybe, CES wifi is famously a disaster and I believe that part. But that's kind of the problem, isn't it. You don't put the flakiest, least-tested feature of your unreleased car in front of a room full of tech reporters at the one venue on earth guaranteed to have terrible wireless conditions. Or you do, but you have a backup plan that isn't "keep talking and hope."
I want to like Faraday Future. I really do. An all-new EV company going after Tesla with a genuinely different design language instead of just copying the Model S silhouette is interesting, and the interior stuff they showed (the seats, the screens, the whole "living room on wheels" pitch) looked slick in the photos. But this is a company that still doesn't have a finished factory. The Nevada plant they broke ground on has reportedly stalled because LeEco itself is bleeding cash, there were stories last month about unpaid suppliers, and now the flagship demo of the flagship feature can't complete a maneuver that a $30,000 Ford can do reliably in a Costco parking lot. My own rental car last summer, a base-model thing I didn't even choose, parallel parked itself better than that on the first try, in an actual parking lot, in actual wifi conditions, which is a low bar and the FF 91 didn't clear it on a stage built for clearing it.
None of this means the FF 91 is vaporware. Companies demo unfinished software on unfinished hardware in front of live audiences all the time and sometimes it's just bad luck. But "sometimes it's bad luck" is also what you say about a coin flip, and I don't think a car company that's asking people to trust it with actual money gets unlimited coin flips. There's a pattern with Faraday Future specifically, where the announcements keep being enormous and the actual production timeline keeps getting vaguer every time someone asks about it directly.
The rest of CES was the usual pile of stuff, honestly. Every appliance in Las Vegas apparently talks to Alexa now, which is its own thing I might write about separately because it's a lot to process, refrigerators that reorder groceries and mirrors that read you the weather and so on. LG had a robot that follows you around your house. There was, as always, a startup with a smart hairbrush. I don't have strong feelings about most of it yet, it's the kind of stuff that either quietly becomes normal in two years or quietly disappears and nobody mentions it again, and you can't really tell which from a show floor demo.
But the FF 91 thing stuck with me because it's such a clean little metaphor for how these events work. You build the room, you build the hype, you build the exact conditions under which the thing is supposed to look effortless, and then the thing doesn't do the effortless part. Everyone claps anyway, or half-claps, and the story becomes about the horsepower number instead of the part that actually failed in front of them. I get why, the horsepower number is real and measurable and the parking thing is "software, we'll fix it." Maybe they will. I'd just want to see it actually park before I believed the 2.39 seconds too.