[Peter Rawlinson, Lucid CEO,] and his team have developed Lucid into a group with three pillars, as he explains. “There's our cars, like the Lucid Air, and there's going to be energy storage and then technology licensing transfer supply.
“We are limited by the number of cars we can make and sell for our technology. I want to have a big impact upon the planet – we're worried about global warming. I want to get more people into electric cars sooner and it's important that we use a multiplier effect that other people can be making cars with our technology.”
There’s a clear inspiration when it comes to using Lucid tech in other cars. “There's a great example in Intel,” said Rawlinson. “There's an Intel inside logo on many computers and it'd be lovely to see ‘Lucid Inside’ on cars, too.”
[...]
Following the Lucid Air next year will be the Gravity SUV. “Gravity is next year, second half of next year – a similar price to Air – and that's on track. I think it's going to be a seminal product – a seven-seat, three-row SUV, super practical.
“After Gravity we’re going to do [Tesla] Model 3 and Model Y competitors. We think around $50,000, maybe $48,000 – something like that. It’s too early to say, but that’s the vision.”
But what about right-hand drive cars for the UK? “Oh, man, I'd love to,” he says. “But it's a matter of engineering priorities. We are slammed – we've got to get Sapphire out this year. Sapphire is our tri-motor version of the Air, our performance version – we're testing that on the road now and it's getting from zero to 60 in 1.89 seconds. And We've got to get Gravity out next year.
“It breaks my heart, maybe we can outsource right-hand drive project to an engineering company to do it for us. The potential market in the UK is probably bigger than even Germany in terms of a latent desire to go EV.”
[...]
“The biggest impact on the mass market car will be with smaller battery packs. My vision is could we get to six miles per kilowatt-hour? We're at 4.6 now. Could we get to six miles per kilowatt-hour with a fast-charging infrastructure, with overnight charging? The electric car of the future only needs 250 miles. We don't need 500-mile cars in the future, 10 years from now.
“If we could get six miles per kilowatt-hour and you only need 150 miles range, that's a 25 kilowatt-hour pack. That's a $4,000 pack particularly with a bit of industrialising scale and battery manufacture. That's what we need to make a $25,000 car and that's what the environment and the world needs urgently to get masses into electric cars. You need the $25,000 car.
“Now is Lucid going to make that? No. It's a horrible thing to be making. But could we be the ‘intel inside’ for that car? The enabler? Absolutely. And that's where we could get the multiplier effect.
“There are only so many cars Lucid could make, but suddenly it's like 20 times more. It's like a software licensing, it's like you just flash out software and your hardware doesn't work without a software flash from us and you have to pay us X amount per car for that flash.
“It's just a ‘Lucid Inside’. That's where I am right now, but we haven’t got all the answers.
“It's really important not to get ahead of ourselves here. For now we've got the to die for partner in Aston Martin. Holy crap – it's wonderful, this isn’t it?”
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