EV

How Lucid Motors Will Take on EV’s Juggernauts: Tesla and China


With the notable exception of Tesla (so far), every automaker lives and dies by the numbers. And for Lucid Motors, the most recent numbers don’t look great. The company is behind on its goal to sell 9000 vehicles this year and lost $685 million in the first quarter.

However, Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson says the headlines don’t tell the full story. “There’s a temporary lull in the uptake of EVs and there are a number of reasons for that,” he acknowledged during an interview at the 2024 Financial Times Future of the Car summit in London. “One is too many people have had a rather inadequate experience from inadequate products. But we’re up 37 percent in terms of deliveries, year on year. We have outsold Porsche Taycan and Mercedes EQS in the U.S.”

And what about that $685 million loss? “That’s been kind of misreported because actually our losses were reduced,” Rawlinson says. “They went from 43 cents a share to 30 cents. It’s just that Wall Street was anticipating 25 cents a share, which was over optimistic. What I can’t emphasize enough, is that our finances are dominated by our investments for the future. We’re pouring serious money into factories, into R&D, into vertically integrating manufacturing technology.”

Rawlinson says it’s wrong to assume Lucid will remain a niche player selling expensive EVs in relatively limited numbers. “I don’t think we’ve given a good enough message that we’re on a mission. We’ve got huge ambitions to be a major volume player. We’re developing the best technology in the world to push down the price of EVs so more people can transition [into EVs].”

The launch later this year of the Gravity SUV means Lucid will have a product that appeals to six times as many potential customers as the Air sedan, Rawlinson says. But the real step-change will be the 2026 launch of a mid-sized sedan that’s specifically aimed at Tesla’s Model 3. The new model will be built at Lucid’s Casa Grande plant in Arizona, but also in a brand-new factory in Saudi Arabia that will have the capacity to produce 150,000 vehicles a year.

Rawlinson believes Lucid’s focus on optimizing range through a holistic approach to powertrain and battery development will be key to making the mid-sized Lucid a genuine Model 3 fighter, and a benchmark mainstream EV. “There’s a perception today that all gasoline cars are bad, and all electric cars are environmentally sustainable. Frankly, they’re not. There is vast range of performance attributes among EVs. Some really are electron guzzlers.”

Rawlinson claims the rear-drive Lucid Air Pure can travel 4.74 miles for every kilowatt hour of energy consumed from its battery, which means it can travel the same distance as a Mercedes-Benz EQS using just two-thirds the electrical energy. “I think we can get to five miles per kilowatt hour within the next 18 months,” he says. “The vision I have— what’s going to save the planet—is the six miles per kilowatt hour car. I think we can do that in the next three years.”

The new mid-sized Lucid will be a $50,000 car, which is just above the average MSRP for a new car sold in the U.S. last year. “I don’t aspire for us to do the $25,000 EV,” Rawlinson says. “But I think the enabler [for a $25,000 EV] could from us.”

Rather than build millions of EVs under the Lucid brand, Rawlinson wants to license Lucid’s technology to other automakers, and have them build millions of Lucid-powered EVs. “Just like you’ve got Intel inside a laptop, you can have Lucid inside powering another brand’s vehicles,” Rawlinson says.