Motion Digest Network

Four month-old Future Mobility Corp. seeks eventually to sell several hundred thousand fully electric, highly automated, China-built vehicles a year. The company is also backed by Chinese luxury-car dealer Harmony New Energy Auto and Foxconn Technology Group, which assembles iPhones for Apple Inc. Apple has been working on its own autonomous electric car.

The company aims to sell cars in China, Europe and the U.S. and to compete with Audi AG, BMW AG and Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz, which combine for three quarters of China’s luxury-car market.

Tencent, China’s biggest social-network company, has a research team working on technology that can be used in automated cars, according to a person familiar with the matter. For now, its involvement in Future Mobility—beyond its minority stake as a financial investor—is limited, the person said.

The companies are poaching talented engineers from global auto and technology giants, and setting up research centers in the West. Future Mobility has hired 50 engineers from BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla and Google.com. Within 12 months it will have about 600 engineers globally.

The company will either build its own plant or partner with an existing auto maker to assemble cars. It has research and development units in Munich and Silicon Valley and is building its headquarters in Shenzhen, where Tencent is based.

Some analysts question how quickly such a new company can achieve its aims. “Several hundred thousand premium cars from an unknown brand sounds like a stretch,” said Bill Russo, managing director at Gao Feng Advisory Co. and former head of Chrysler’s North East Asia business. “Building a brand and competing with the likes of the premium car makers is very difficult. And the competition will not stand still.”