Future Mobility is only four months old, but that isn’t stopping the auto startup from rolling out with its ambitious plans. Backed by Chinese Internet giant, Tencent, Future Mobility is aiming to sell premium electric cars by 2020 on a worldwide scale, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The startup has already poached 50 engineers from the likes of Google, Tesla, Mercedes-Benz and BMW and its chief executive, Carsten Breitfeld, says that the company will ramp up to nearly 600 engineers around the world within a year.
Breitfeld himself is a former project manager for BMW’s i8 plug-in sports car, so Future Mobility is in good hands. He told the Journal that Future Mobility wants to compete with BMW, Mercedes and Audi, especially in China’s luxury-car space. Whether the startup will work with an existing automaker or build its own plant remains to be seen, but in a short period of time we have seen bustling activity from Chinese Internet giants in the auto market.
Just last week, Alibaba unveiled its first smart car, which is already available for pre-order. And last month, Baidu, Tencent and JD.com each made a $50 million investment in Bitauto, which we’ve described as a combination of Cars.com, AutoTrader and Consumer Reports. Our email to Tencent to learn more about their EV plan wasn’t immediately returned.