On Wednesday 3 September 2026, the Los Angeles Times put Faraday Future’s robotics pivot on the record: El Segundo headquarters, dancing bots on the floor, and a company that sold 16 FF 91 electric vehicles from 2023 to 2025 now asking buyers to take humanoids seriously. Caroline Petrow-Cohen’s piece is not a product launch. It is a survival story with price tags. Chris Chen, co-chief executive of Faraday Future Robotics, framed the goal as useful machines rather than a single hero SKU, and named assembly in California with parts still arriving from China. FIRGELLI reads the filing the way a buyer should: priced, claimed, and still short of a joint map that would let you size actuators or a duty cycle.
The headline numbers in the Times report are concrete enough to hold. The All-New Futurist starts at about US$89,900. Master, described as a mid-level entertainment humanoid, starts at about US$37,990. FX Navi, a small quadruped aimed at students learning to code, is listed at about US$1,990. Faraday says it has five robots for sale with two more coming, and it is touting a plan to deliver 2,000 units this year. Second-quarter earnings, also cited in the piece, showed a US$39 million net loss after the company failed to sell enough EVs or robots. Share price had already collapsed more than 99% from the 2021 peak; a reverse split in July was the Nasdaq survival move.
What the sheet actually says, and what it does not
New Atlas covered the All-New Futurist earlier in the summer as a 1.72 m (5 ft 8 in) biped with Nvidia full-body motion control and a dual-battery pack claimed for up to six hours. That height is the figure FIRGELLI will use until Faraday publishes a different one under its own letterhead. The February NADA launch priced an earlier Futurist from US$34,990 plus a US$5,000 skills package, and Master from US$19,990 plus US$3,000. The All-New trim at US$89,900, including a US$10,000 premium skills package in Faraday’s Automate-era release language, is a different SKU, not a typo on the same machine. Treat the February and September price cards as a family tree, not one MSRP.
What is still missing is the hardware that decides whether a station works. Public materials do not give a reliable per-joint torque table, continuous payload at the wrist, hand DoF, thermal derate after an hour of loco-manipulation, or a measured cycle time on any named warehouse or factory task. Our own catalog card for Futurist still carries thin, inconsistent rows (including a millimetre-scale height artifact and a 28-DoF estimate) because Faraday has not published a buyer datasheet that would replace them. That is not a quibble about marketing copy. Without continuous torque, payload and thermal numbers, you cannot size a cell, pick a gripper, or compare Futurist to a Unitree H1-class machine or a wheeled dual-arm worker already running void-fill on a Korean packing line.
U.S. assembly, Chinese parts, and a ban that does not erase the BOM
Faraday is leaning hard on “Built in USA” and “Assembled in USA” language after Washington restricted Chinese imports of new humanoid and four-legged robots. The Times notes the company still plans to import parts from China under current rules, and to build at the 1.1-million-square-foot Hanford, California plant that absorbed nearly US$4 billion of EV investment. That is an honest industrial statement if you read it carefully: final assembly and branding can sit in California while motors, gearboxes, boards and batteries remain an Asia-heavy bill of materials. Buyers who need origin certainty for procurement should ask for a country-of-origin breakdown by actuator family, not a press-release slogan.
Chen told the Times the robots are meant for education, housework, warehouse work, performances, child care, companionship and customer-facing roles at places such as dealerships and salons. Aegis, the quadruped, is in security and perimeter tests. Faber is the industrial-oriented line. Telemetry analyst Sam Abuelsamid, quoted in the same piece, was blunt: he does not see useful education products here, and he expects the home market to stay thin. FIRGELLI’s bar matches that skepticism. Dancing on a showroom floor proves balance and choreography under teleop or a demo policy. It does not prove a six-hour warehouse shift, a published intervention rate, or a service interval on the wrist actuators.
Deliveries are the only metric that matters next
Faraday’s own history is the context. Sixteen FF 91 cars across three years is not a manufacturing ramp; it is a warning about quoting unit targets before the line proves it can ship. A 2,000-robot year would be a real pivot if the company publishes cumulative delivered units by SKU, not deposits or “ecosystem” preorders. February coverage already mentioned more than a thousand non-binding deposits around the NADA launch. Deposits are not torque. Deposits are not uptime.
Compare the claim set to what this desk already tracks. CJ Logistics put two named ROBOTIS AI Worker units onto a live Olive Young packing station with a one-DoF two-finger gripper and still withheld takt and thermal numbers. Figure 03 is sequencing parts at BMW Spartanburg with wireless charging and tactile hands on the brochure, and still without a public continuous-payload card. Futurist sits in the same honesty bracket: a price, a height, a compute brand, a battery claim, and a factory address. Until Faraday prints joint continuous torque, wrist payload, hand configuration, measured runtime under a named duty, and delivered-unit counts, treat the Times story as a corporate strategy note, not a buying guide.
What a buyer should ask before wiring a deposit
Ask for the All-New Futurist joint map with continuous and peak torque per axis. Ask for wrist payload at full reach, and whether that number is for one arm or both. Ask which hand ships on the US$89,900 trim, and whether tactile sensing is standard or a skills-package add-on. Ask for case temperature at the hip and shoulder after sixty minutes of walking plus manipulation, against ambient. Ask how many Futurist and Master units have actually shipped to paying customers as of September 2026, by serial range if they will give it. Ask which Hanford processes are final assembly versus kit packing of imported modules. Ask what fails first under warehouse duty: battery swap logistics, wrist backlash, or perception on deformable objects.
FIRGELLI’s read on 3 September is straightforward. Faraday Future is pricing humanoids because the EV story ran out of buyers, and the Times reported that pivot with usable sticker numbers. All-New Futurist at about US$89,900, Master at about US$37,990, Navi at about US$1,990, Hanford as the assembly bet, China still on the BOM, and a 2,000-unit year as the ambition. Useful if true. Unproven on joints, payload, thermal and delivered volume. Hold Futurist to the same bar as every other humanoid on this desk: a named trim, a published continuous-torque row, and a measured shift, not a dance clip.