All right, we get it.
You're sick and tired of every electric vehicle company in creation being described as a "Tesla (TSLA) -) rival."
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But Lucid (LCID) -) CEO Peter Rawlinson is really serious about competing with the EV giant. Just ask him.
Rawlinson, who once worked for Elon Musk's company, said recently that in a few years the company would be debuting vehicles that compete with Tesla's Model 3 sedan and Model Y midsize SUV. The Lucid vehicles will come with starting prices of about $50,000.
“The midsized [line] is going to be overtly a Tesla competitor – Model 3, Model Y," he said in an interview with Autocar. "This is the first time I’ve ever said it: We’re going to compete in that market – high-volume family car."
"And how can we compete? Because we’ve got the most advanced technology, which means we can go farther with less battery, and the battery is the most high-cost item of an electric car," Rawlinson said.
"So if you can go a certain distance with less battery, you can make that car more cheaply than anyone else.”
Lucid: Driving down the cost of EVs
In an interview with InsideEVs, Rawlinson pushed back against the notion that Lucid is "this niche-playing, super-expensive company that just panders to the wealthy."
"The vision of the company is to really drive down the cost of electric cars because it's very important for the planet," he said. "We just have to start with high-end products because the economics are such you just can't do it any other way."
Details of what to expect from the next Lucid intro remain under wraps, but Rawlinson did suggest that it would appear much earlier than has previously been reported.
“I’ve formally stated mid-late-decade, and that has been completely misquoted as the end of the decade – 2030. What I mean is ‘not 2025’. It’s a few years away, but it’s close. It takes 3 1/2 years to do a car, and we’ve started … and that wasn’t yesterday.”
Last month, the company debuted the Lucid Gravity at the L.A. Auto Show. This is Lucid's follow-up to the Air sedan and its first SUV.
Car and Driver, by the way, named the Lucid Air Pure to its 10 Best list, describing it at as a "fresh take" on electric cars.
Lucid opened a plant in Saudi Arabia in September, with initial capacity to produce 5,000 EVs a year, after the Saudi government pledged to buy as many as 100,000 vehicles from it over 10 years.
Saudi Arabia's sovereign-wealth fund, Public Investment Fund, owns more than a 60% stake in Lucid.
Investing in the future
Like many electric vehicle startups, Lucid has faced some challenges.
While deliveries have remained relatively even, Lucid's production numbers have been consistently falling.
The automaker produced 3,493 vehicles in the final quarter of 2022, 2,314 vehicles in the first quarter of 2023, 2,173 in the second quarter and 1,550 in the third.
In November, Lucid said it expected to produce 8,000 to 8,500 vehicles this year, down from its earlier forecast of more than 10,000.
The company said it was cutting the production forecast "to prudently align with deliveries."
Lucid also said on Dec. 10 that Sherry House, its chief financial officer, would be stepping down immediately.
Rawlinson dismissed notions that the company was "losing this crazy amount of money per car."
"It's so misleading," he said. "Our finances are dominated by the investment we're putting in for the future. We've got a factory in Saudi Arabia, we've got the big expansion in Arizona for Gravity. We're spending a fortune on the tooling now for Gravity to make this fantastic machine here in America."
Rawlinson added that "all that is on our books. ... [That] is the investment for the company's future."
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