The secretive electric car company Faraday Future is getting a little less mysterious.
The California-based startup is partnering with British luxury car maker Aston Martin to collaborate on electric vehicles, according to a Reuters report.
The report says Aston Martin has entered a deal with the Chinese technology firm LeEco (formerly LeTV), which is also one of Faraday's biggest partners, to develop a production version of its all-electric Aston Martin RapidE concept.
As part of the deal, the British car maker is also expected to collaborate with Faraday Future on "a range of next-generation connected electric vehicles," according to a Aston Martin press release.
The companies aim to bring the RapidE to production by as soon as 2018, according to the press release.
The companies originally announced the new deal on Wednesday at a press event in Frankfurt, Germany.
Faraday Future revealed its first concept car, the FFZero1, at CES in January. While the car certainly looked impressive, the company stressed that it was the car's engineering platform that would be the real game changer.
Faraday uses a Variable Platform Architecture (VPA), which is a modular platform designed specifically for electric vehicles. Basically, the skateboard-style chassis can easily be adjusted by changing the lengths of the rails and other structures.
The company also uses a new battery structure that allows it to change the size of the battery easily to fit the modular platform.
Given that Faraday will be working with Aston Martin, we now have more confirmation that Faraday is focusing on the higher end of the market.
In January, Faraday's head designer told Tech Insider that its first production car wouldn't be for everybody.
"We are working on more than one car, the first car does fall into the premium side of the market,” Richard Kim, the company’s lead designer, told us.
However, Kim was quick to point out that Faraday plans to eventually roll out more cars and that the company already has more than one test vehicle on the road. So perhaps we can expect more partnerships between Faraday Future and other car companies down the road.
