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Chinese Tesla rival unveils futuristic car being developed in Santa Clara
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The Byton SUV that Future Mobility unveiled at CES on Sunday wouldn't look out of place in a BMW showroom. That may be because its founders are both veterans of the German auto maker, despite the company being based in China.
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By Cromwell Schubarth – TechFlash Editor, Silicon Valley Business Journal
Jan 8, 2018, 6:39am PST Updated 13 hours ago
A Chinese car company that opened its North American headquarters in Santa Clara last month took the wraps off of its Tesla challenger on Sunday.
If the vehicles of the future are truly "computers on wheels," they could very well look something like the $45,000 all-electric SUV that Future Mobility Corp. showed off at the Consumer Electronics Show.
The exterior of the vehicle rolled out at CES wouldn't look out of place in a BMW showroom. That may be because Future Mobility is the brainchild of a pair of former executives of the German auto maker — CEO Carsten Breitfeld headed the BMW i8 program and President Daniel Kirchert was managing director of Infiniti China after a long career at BMW.
Inside the Byton, however, the dashboard has been replaced by a massive video screen and there is a tablet computer mounted on the steering wheel. Both can be controlled by touch, voice activation, facial recognition and gestures.
There are also screens on the back of the front-seat headrests, ready to entertain whoever is in the back seat. In the concept car, these are controlled through facial recognition and gestures but not touch.
It's all connected to a digital cloud platform that the company is calling “Byton Life,” which connects the devices on the vehicle with all of the driver's and passengers' applications, data and devices. This is designed to allow video chats along with music and video streaming. It also keeps track of what each person in the car is doing to create a “Byton ID” that will import their preferences into any Byton they happen to be in.
And what's a modern mobile computing pitch without a health hook? The car's platform syncs with the fitness wearables of those inside it. There there are also iHealth Labs devices the company said will be “perfectly integrated in side pods” to track things like heart rate, weight, oxygen saturation or blood pressure.
The company said this health data can be used to offer riders "meaningful advice.” But what are the odds that a Byton will advise its passenger to get off their butts and go for a walk?
A fully-charged base model of the concept car shown off in Las Vegas can travel an estimated 250 miles between charges with a single rear-mounted 272-horsepower motor, the company said. Byton also said a high-performance dual-motor version will harness 476 horsepower and go about 325 miles before a recharge.
All of this remains a concept for now and those don't always come true, as Byton's team members who fled another Chinese car company, Faraday Future, can attest. That company similarly unveiled a flashy car at last year's CES and claimed to get more than 60,000 reservations within 36 hours. Faraday founder Jia Yueting is now defying government orders to return to China to clean up the financial mess that would-be Tesla-killer created.
Future Mobility isn't the only Chinese vehicle maker working on futuristic EVs, either. There is also Nio, led by the former chief technology officer of Cisco Systems from its U.S. headquarters in San Jose, and Sokon's SF Motors, whose American operations are also based in Santa Clara and includes Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard as its chief innovation officer.
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