Faraday Future FFZero1 Concept

New electric car company Faraday Future has entered the automotive industry with a high-tech supercar, which runs on a modular battery that can be easily resized for its upcoming vehicle designs.

Faraday Future, which was set up eight months ago, revealed a prototype of the battery-powered FFZero1 at theCES technology show in Las Vegas this week. The company said its debut model incorporates enough technology for the vehicle to develop a "sixth sense for its driver's intentions and needs".

The FFZero1 concept features a new kind of battery structure, comprising cells that are arranged into what the company calls "strings". Adding or removing these strings changes battery capacity and creates new wheelbases – the distance between the front and rear axles of a vehicle.

This modular system allows the car maker to use the same structure for all its vehicles, altering it depending on the size and power specifications of any given design quickly and cheaply.

"With Variable Platform Architecture we can add or subtract strings of batteries," said research chief Nick Sampson – a former engineer at Elon Musk's electric car company Tesla. "Based on those power cells we can create different models and have a different desired range without having to redesign the entire structure."

"This is really important in terms of time, cost and efficiency," he added.

The vehicle's streamlined carbon-fibre exterior is shaped to optimise the way it moves through the air, improving both driving performance and energy efficiency.

A transparent tail fin slotted behind the domed cockpit stretches to the vehicle's rear. This feature further improves stability when changing direction as well as acting as a digital canvas displaying information such as the battery-charge level, driver name, and track position.Air flows through the vehicle's structure thanks to an aerodynamic tunnel, which cools the battery and motor surfaces. Air flowing through the tunnel also reduces air resistance – known as drag – and therefore improves the vehicle's top speed, which is claimed to be in excess of 200 miles per hour (321.87 kilometres per hour).