Peter Rawlinson, CEO of Lucid Motors Inc., next to the Lucid Air prototype electric vehicle in 2020. Photo / Getty Images
Peter Rawlinson engineered the Tesla Model S. His new Lucid Air sedan is a direct challenge to Tesla's dominance.
It celebrated the production of its first cars less than two months ago. Deliveries have just begun. But for a company with so few vehicles on the road, Lucid Motors is generating a lot of buzz.
Its debut sedan, the US$169,000 ($240,000) Lucid Air Dream Edition, has been hailed for its workmanship and the ability to travel a record 835km on a single charge. MotorTrend magazine declared it the car of the year. And Lucid's shares have more than doubled in the last month, putting the company's worth at US$85 billion — a valuation higher than Ford Motor Co.'s.
The accolades are a tribute to Lucid's CEO, Peter Rawlinson, an auto industry veteran who engineered the Model S, the sedan that established Tesla as a serious carmaker. Now, he hopes that the Air will do the same for Lucid.
"The first product defines the brand," he said recently at Lucid's factory in the Arizona desert. "We'll need to create a technological tour de force, and I think that's what we've got in Lucid Air. We define our brand, we define our future."
Along with Rivian Automotive, the neophyte manufacturer of electric trucks that is worth roughly US$130 billion a week after listing its shares, Lucid illustrates investors' enthusiasm for everything having to do with electric vehicles.
But the list of things that could go wrong is long — 44 pages long, in the mandatory disclosure of potential risks in Lucid's stock offering prospectus. The document notes that the company lacks experience mass producing cars, that it has no service network and that it is highly dependent on Rawlinson, a 64-year-old Welshman who is, after all, mortal.
And there are also plenty of investors who see a tech bubble in the making and are betting it will burst. Short sellers, who use borrowed stocks to make money if a company's share price goes down, have wagered US$2.35 billion that Lucid will not be able to maintain its lofty valuation, according to data from S3 Partners, a New York firm that tracks short sales.
Lucid shares languished for several months after the company made its stock market debut in July through a merger with a blank-check corporation known as Churchill Capital Corp IV. They began climbing in October, after Road & Track declared that the Air was "so good it should make Tesla sweat."
Rawlinson's credibility with investors stems largely from his résumé. He worked at Jaguar and was chief engineer of Lotus, the British sports carmaker. His name is on dozens of patents for battery technology or other innovations. Rawlinson oversaw Lucid's development of the battery used by all the teams in the Formula E electric-vehicle racing circuit.
But mass producing automobiles is a challenge of a different magnitude. Initial versions of the Air cost almost US$35,000 more than a top-of-the-line Tesla Model S Plaid. To be profitable, Lucid must appeal to more than just a superwealthy elite.
"Lucid's biggest risks are getting to scale and capacity," said Daniel Ives, a senior analyst at Wedbush Securities who follows the electric car industry. "The first phase has been significantly successful. Now it's about the next level of adoption."
Lucid plans to offer a version of the Air next year that will cost US$70,000 after a federal tax credit, and produce 500,000 cars a year by 2030, with a lineup that will include an SUV and a pickup. The company had burned through US$4.2 billion by June, and its prospectus noted that it might be years away from making money.
To avoid the problems that plagued Tesla in its early days, when for a while it was assembling cars in tents, Rawlinson is relying on people like Eric Bach, Lucid's chief engineer. Bach, another Tesla alumnus, has worked at Volkswagen and takes a very German approach to manufacturing. He can expound at length on the art of achieving narrow body gaps, the spaces between sheet metal that to engineers are a measure of quality.
"We're not intending to put any tents up," Bach said, except perhaps "to have a party."
At the same time, the market is increasingly crowded. Automakers like Ford, General Motors and Volkswagen have invested heavily in electric vehicles.
Rawlinson has confounded naysayers before. He points out that some people doubted that the Model S would be a success, or said Lucid could not build a car with a range of 805km and get it out the factory door this year.
"There is a track record here of me making claims which seem unrealistic but are absolutely based on science," he said.
Success would have an extra bit of sweetness for Rawlinson, who left Tesla amid rancor with Elon Musk, the company's mercurial CEO.
The main reason he quit Tesla in 2012, Rawlinson said, was to care for his ailing mother in Wales. But he added that he had also felt mistreated by Musk.
"I had a mom who needed me, and I had a boss who wasn't treating me very well," he said, declining to elaborate on the nature of the mistreatment.
Rawlinson, who comes across as good humoured but intense and detail oriented, is self-effacing in a way that Musk is not. He says, for example, that he wants to hire people who are smarter than he is.
"If I've done my job right, I'll be the dumbest guy left in the room and I can walk out and throw away the key and leave them to it," Rawlinson said with a laugh.
After it began in 2007 as a battery-maker named Atieva, the company had several near-death experiences. Atieva shifted focus toward building electric vehicles in 2014 and changed its name to Lucid two years later. It struggled to raise enough money for the capital-intensive business of building cars, but was saved in 2018 by a US$1 billion investment from the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, which remains a majority shareholder.
"Everyone says, 'Oh, the tough thing about a startup is getting an assembly line going,'" Rawlinson said. "Let me tell you what's tough: getting finance for the startup not to go bankrupt."
Stock bonuses tied to Lucid's share price are likely to make Rawlinson a billionaire if he isn't already. But Alejandro Agag, founder and chairman of Formula E, said he did not think Rawlinson was motivated by money.
"Of course, it's nice to have money," Agag said. "What drives him is to make the best car."
Lucid started delivering the first of 520 Air Dream Edition cars to customers late last month, with plans to ramp up production and deliveries of three other Air models soon. The performance version of the sold-out Dream Edition boasts 1,111 horsepower, while another version focused on distance driving can travel 835km between charges, more than any other car tested by the Environmental Protection Agency. Lucid received that rating in September, when its vehicles seized the top six spots in the EPA's battery-range ranking, unseating the previous record-holder: the Model S Long Range, which can go 650km between charges.
The endurance is the product of Rawlinson's obsession with reducing the weight of the components that move the car forward, including an electric motor that he likes to show off by rolling it to presentations in a carry-on suitcase.
Tyler Schilling, the retired founder of a robotics company, reserved a Lucid after attending a launch event in December 2016 and was one of the first to receive his car last month.
He immediately put the vehicle to the test on California's winding coastal roads.
"I was shocked," Schilling, who owns 14 cars and a pickup truck, said of the Lucid Air. "That car handles a good 1,500 pounds lighter than it actually is. It's super impressive."
The company said this month that it had more than 17,000 reservations and was aiming to make 20,000 vehicles next year.
Rawlinson justifies the high cost by saying that early, superluxury versions will establish that Lucid can deliver meticulous workmanship. Road & Track thinks Lucid has succeeded.
"Lucid's posh quarters make a Tesla's interior look like the mismatched Tupperware in the back of your cupboard," the magazine wrote last month after a test drive. Ouch.
Rawlinson's compact motors freed up interior space for passengers, and the car includes frills like an optional solid glass roof and seats that give passengers a massage. The most powerful version can outrun a Ferrari.
In Rawlinson's telling, the luxury cars are just a steppingstone to his ultimate goal: making battery-powered mobility accessible to everyone. Lucid is open to selling its technology to companies that can produce millions of vehicles at low cost.
"I'm not here to sell ultraluxury cars," Rawlinson said. "I want to mass-industrialise electric cars."
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Niraj Chokshi and Jack Ewing
© 2021 THE NEW YORK TIMES