In auto industry terms, 2017 is not very far away. If GM, Toyota, or VW Group announced today that it would debut a brand-new car you haven’t heard anything about in under two years—and that it hadn’t even established the production facility to build it—that would sound a little far-fetched.
Now imagine the company making that announcement is a brand-new startup that nobody’s heard of before, that has never produced a vehicle. And the car it’s promising is all-electric, with performance targets that out-gun Tesla’s best.