Don’t call the Lucid Air a Tesla killer

Lucid has Tesla roots. But before it was making luxury electric vehicles, it was the battery supplier for Formula E cars that race at speeds faster than 150 mph. 

Now it’s planning to launch its first car, the Air, at the New York International Auto Show in April.

The Bay Area company formed in 2007. Three years ago, it showed off its first prototype. And in 2018 it got a $1 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.  

So far it’s on track to start producing the first batch of its $100,000-range luxury sedans by the end of 2020. In its first year, it wants to make 20,000 cars. Sadly, we won’t know much about the Air until the auto show. 

We do know, however, a lot about Lucid’s influences. The company’s CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson hails from Tesla, where he served as VP of engineering for three years. While there, he worked on the Model S, Tesla’s higher-end sedan. 

He says the Air will have a 400-mile range, better than anything out there. The longest-range (and most expensive) Tesla Model S caps out at 390 miles in the best conditions. The Air is built around the battery, developed from Lucid’s experience with electric racing. If you’re all about the Porsche Taycan-Tesla Model S rivalry, the Air should crush both.

Before Lucid was Lucid, it was Atieva. It has supplied the batteries for all cars for the past five seasons of Formula E, the electric car racing series that started in 2014. It will do the same next season. Until a few years ago, cars had to swap their batteries mid-race. Now Atieva’s batteries last a full race.

The company wants to put all that track experience into a fancy sedan. 

“We’re using what we’ve learned on the race track and making these things reproducible, mass manufacturable,” Rawlinson explained about the Air’s design.

Rawlinson is passionate about batteries and efficiency. Last month, during a personal tour of the Lucid headquarters in Newark, a small mostly industrial city east of San Francisco, he walked me through every step of building battery packs. The Air has a 900-volt battery, compared to Tesla’s 400-volt battery and the Taycan’s 800-volt pack. 

But don’t call the Air a Tesla killer.

“We can happily coexist with Tesla,” Rawlinson said after showing me a robotic scanner. Tesla is trying to catch up to the not-yet-released Air with its newly announced 110-kWh battery pack. That will finally get its cars to that coveted 400-mile range.

Rawlinson says no company has made a true luxury EV yet. (Just don’t tell Jaguar, Porsche, Audi, Tesla, or Mercedes.) 

The Air features three exterior color choices in earthy browns and silvers. The interior color palettes are named for four California locales at certain times of day: Santa Cruz at 12:09 p.m., Lake Tahoe at 7:01 p.m., the Mojave desert a minute before midnight, and Santa Monica at 5:11 a.m.

Rawlinson is clear that he’s going after the Mercedes S-Class customers and other German luxury car owners, not the Tesla crowd. But Lucid isn’t completely ignoring the more price-conscious buyers. Rawlinson promised a lower-range model that’s “less expensive and more nimble.” But first,  all its efforts are focused on the top-of-the-line Air.

Back at the Newark production facility, 80 beta prototypes float like ghosts behind the company offices. Some of these cars will go through crash testing. Others are in Minnesota to see how it fares in cold weather. The company actually has more of them on the road than on private tracks, so keep an eye out for camouflaged Lucid Airs.

Everything built here will eventually be put together on a larger scale at the soon-to-open factory in Casa Grande, Arizona. Made up of 11 million pounds of steel, Rawlinson noted, “It’s not a factory designed to be pretty, but functional.” He claims the factory’s frame is 70 percent complete.

Rawlinson knows his 400-mile range sounds impressive coming from a first-generation vehicle, and he’s proud of it even if the official U.S. Environmental Protection Agency electric car range and efficiency hasn’t been confirmed. 

“Building a car is like designing a 3D puzzle,” Rawlinson exclaimed. “I’m chasing down efficiency.”

For Rawlinson it comes down to “dumb range” or “smart range.” One involves sticking a giant battery pack into the car, even if it weighs a ton and costs a fortune to move. His goal is to improve range with less weight while taking up less space in the vehicle, mainly through its high-voltage battery, which will have an atypical trapezoid shape instead of a clunkier square block. 

It took years for Tesla to establish itself as the premiere EV company. Soon, we’ll see if Lucid can run laps around it.