The difficulty of starting up a car company, and the unlikelihood of anyone duplicating Tesla’s success, are so well known as to require no repetition here. Suffice it to say that Faraday Future’s recent colorfully-worded announcement that it intends to bring a new EV to the market has been greeted with predictable skepticism.

However, the amount of figurative salt heaped upon this new dish has been limited by the illustrious names among the company’s 200 employees. Nick Sampson, reportedly one of Faraday’s co-founders, was Director of Vehicle and Chassis Engineering at Tesla from 2010 to 2012, and spent 10 years with Lotus before that.

The company’s roster includes several other erstwhile senior Teslans, plus such luminaries as Richard Kim, who helped design BMW’s i3 and i8; Silva Hiti, a multiple patent-holder who worked on the Chevy Volt; Pontus Fontaeus, former Volvo Director of Interior Design; and Porter Harris, a former Energy Storage Engineer at SpaceX.

Faraday Future was named for Michael Faraday, whom many consider to be the father of the electromagnetic motor and electrochemical batteries. Currently residing in a former Nissan testing center in Gardena, California, the company told Venture Beat that it’s shopping for a production facility. It claims to be “well-funded,” and is not in the market for capital at the moment.

Details about the planned vehicle are few. FF says it will be launched in 2017, and will be “100% electric, zero-emission, fully-connected and personalized in ways you’ve never even considered possible.” Its batteries will (of course) offer the highest energy density and specific energy on the market. FF says its battery pack will have 15 percent higher specific energy than a Tesla Model S 85 kWh pack. That should work out to a 98 kWh pack, offering at least 300 miles of range.

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Sources: Motor Trend, Electrek, AutoblogGreen, Gas2