The state of Faraday Future has officially turned depressing. It’s bad enough that the company has fallen on hard times and is desperate to raise more money to keep operations afloat, it’s another level of misery when its employees resort to setting a fund-raising campaign on Go Fund Me just to keep their own families afloat. The $50,000 campaign was started by Hector Padilla and Asim Sher, both of whom work for Faraday Future. At the moment, the page has raised over $17,000 since it launched on November 1, 2018. The goal, according to the campaign, is to “help all of those Manufacturing Team members that are in need of financial support because of lay off or mandatory furlough.”

Another day, another depressing news item surrounding Faraday Future. It feels like an eternity ago when the automaker turned a lot of heads at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show when it presented the FF91 all-electric concept. The company was the talk of the town then. Now, it’s moved well beyond laughingstock status because that implies that the company can still recover and get back on its feet. Faraday Future has become a depressing reminder of what happens when you promise the moon and stars but fail to even get off the ground.

It’s not even funny anymore because the lives and livelihood of these people and their families are getting affected by the company that’s supposed to provide for them. But the opposite has happened. Faraday furloughed all the manufacturing employees at its factory in Hanford, California, specifically those who have been working with the company for less than six moments. Other employees and managers, on the other hand, now have to work on a reduced salary, all while waiting for new funding that may never come.

The company thought they had a lifeline when they struck a $2 billion deal with Hong Kong-based Evergrande Health that included an $800 million investment to help get the company through the first six months of the deal. But for reasons that are still unclear to a lot of people, Faraday burned through that $800 million in four months, with nothing but a few prototypes to show for it. That led to a legal dispute with Evergrande where an arbitrator in Hong Kong ruled that the automaker can seek new funding sources from other companies. Unfortunately for the company, that same arbitrator did not require Evergrande to release any more money to Faraday. That looks like another burning bridge right there.

Sampson’s exit wasn’t a one-off incident, either. A number of high-ranking executives have also bailed on the company, including a trio of former BMW execs: chief designer Richard Kim, Chief Financial Officer Stefan Krause, and Chief Technical Officer Ulrich Kranz. All three joined the company to steer Faraday to a promising future. When they saw the writing on the wall, they were gone. Sampson’s departure also came a day after another company exec, senior vice president of technology and product development Peter Savagian, packed his bags.

The good news for these people is that they’re established enough that they can get jobs in other places. Finding employment shouldn’t be a problem for them. But we can’t say the same thing for the blue-collar workers of the company, all of whom are either on furlough or are now working on reduced salaries.

That’s what the Go Fund Me campaign is for. It’s raised over $17,000 since we last hopped onto the page, and while that is a healthy figure that can help those in need, it’s still a long ways off from the campaign’s $50,000 goal.

Hopefully, more people step up and help those employees in need. It’s one thing to struggle working for a company on a budget; it’s another thing entirely to work without getting paid for a company that has no budget at all.

Further reading

Read our full review on the 2018 Faraday Future FF 91.