51 LUCID
Believe in Lucid, the EV start-up that thinks like Musk and Chapman
One in a thousand: if you’re a baby turtle, still in your egg, those are your odds of survival. Dehydration, crabs, birds, David Attenborough’s clumsy camera crew… the threats to your existence are myriad.
The survival rate among Silicon Valley electric start-ups is every bit as brutal. But Lucid felt different from the start. When CAR first visited, in 2018, there were prototypes and there was ambition but there was no factory and no cars in customer hands. Since then there’s been a stock market flotation, the appointment of (ex-Lotus, ex-Tesla) CTO Peter Rawlinson as CEO, rave reviews of the Air (above), confirmation that an SUV will follow, and the creation of a factory.
‘ We did the fastest build of an electric car factory, Ibelieve,inhistory,’saysRawlinson.‘It’sthefirstpurpos-ebuilt green-field EV factory in North America, capable of 30,000 units per year. We started production late last year. Plus we listed on Wall Street in July last year and raised nearly $6bn billion in the process. There’s since been another $2bn in the form of a green bond from the financial markets.’
All of which will help pay for the next step of the plan. ‘Phase two of the factory will take us to 90,000 units, synchronised with the arrival of the Gravity SUV [Lucid’s second model line, due to break cover in the next 10 months]. I’m not an SUV guy – more my style is my ’67 Lotus Elan, on its 145 tyres. It’s the pinnacle of steering feel and finesse. But even as a non-SUV guy I think Gravity is going to be awesome.’
For one, Lucid’s SUV will be more than an SUV body on the existing saloon platform. While the industry tends to favour such an approach, for economies of scale, Rawlinson points out that, given the SUV is set to more than double volume, new tools will be required sooner or later to deal with the wear and tear. So why not create a second, SUV-optimised set of tools now?
‘That way we can have more SUV-like characteristics,’ explains Rawlinson. ‘Gravity will use a similar platform to the Air but we can differentiate the product more, for a greater total addressable market. That’s why I’m so excited about Gravity. It’s going to be a high-performance yet practical SUV, and very different to the Air.’
Key to Lucid’s appeal remains the quality of its design and engineering. The Air is a big EV with the waft and wanton luxury of an S-Class, yet on Californian canyon roads it’ll hustle like an M5. It’s also very pretty, a quality that isn’t anything like as universal in the luxury EV
