In Lucid Air, we have truly
a technological tour de force, there's nothing even close to it. Lucid Motors is a California-based
electric vehicle startup, and in September, it revealed the air, its
vision for an electric luxury sedan. The company's first vehicle touts some
impressive specs, such as an estimated 517 miles of range, a quarter
mile time of 9.9 seconds and DC fast charging up to
20 miles per minute. What Lucid has really been touting with all
of this is a holistic view of it being better than the model S. And overall, I believe Rawlinson said
that it's 17 percent more efficient. But the company has
a lot of challenges ahead. Automotive companies are notoriously hard to
start and EV startups have typically been failing endeavors. Starting an EV project and bringing that
to fruition is a real, enormous task. The auto industry is a tough
business to get into, very capital intensive. For a high volume model program
to develop a vehicle and tool up a factory and
bring it to production. I mean, that's usually, a billion to
a billion and a half dollar effort. It's funding, frankly, that's
the biggest one. And why you've had problems at Faraday,
why you had problems at Fisker. They ran out of funds through
the development cycle of the vehicle. Even in the case
of Fisker, post-launch. A good amount of the talent at
Lucid also worked at Tesla, which may give them a leg up. The CEO,
Peter Rawlinson, was a VP of vehicle engineering and chief engineer
of the Model S. The styling design, which was
done by Franz von Holzhausen. I took from Franz's design, the style
of the car, and I was responsible for leading the design
engineering of the vehicle. Prior to Tesla, h e spent several
years with Jaguar and was chief engineer of advanced
engineering at Lotus. All of that experience led him to a
lofty goal, to become the next big EV player in the industry. This is about far more
than just Lucid Air. We're creating a brand, the Lucid brand,
and we have to compete with other brands which are very prestigious
and have existed for many instances over 100 years. We have Tesla as the prime example
of a startup that was successful. We've also seen a lot of failures. You're talking about 10 to 15 companies
that have or are attempting to launch with a vehicle
and an EV company. Some have already failed. Even if it manages to bring the
Air to market, competition in the space is heating up. Last year, 143 new
EVs launched around the globe, and by 2023, IHS predicts over 43 brands
will offer an electric vehicle. I think when you put specs up like
that and you put features and content and styling like they've done with the Air,
I think it's going to be a highly competitive vehicle. Lucid is one of many electric vehicle
startups that have popped up over the last five, 10 years, but they're
a little bit different from a lot of them. Peter Rawlinson has been
around the industry for quite some time, including a stint at Tesla. He's got the expertise that a lot
of the other companies don't have who are entering the space. The chief
engineer was also a former Tesla employee in addition to Peter. Not only do they have automotive
experience, but they have EV automotive experience. Lucid was started in 2007 as
Atieva with a focus on being an EV supplier. Atieva had significant knowledge
of cell technology and of battery management software and the electronics
that you need to manage battery systems. We're the standard
battery supplier for the World Championship Electric Racing Series and
that battery technology, which is entirely done in-house, branded under
our Atieva brand was really the proof point which
validated our technology. Through that, Lucid has actually learned
a lot about design and performance of high-performance
battery packs. We put a lot of that knowledge into
the Lucid Air, so that's why we are claiming its race-proven because
it really is. In 2013, it recruited Peter Rawlinson
as its chief technology officer. I wanted to create the
next generation electric car. And the other condition was, you're going
to have to change the name of the company. In 2016, the company
was renamed to Lucid Motors and it started building
its first vehicle. Many of my engineers from what was
the Model S program came across and joined me. Peter rang me up, said,
Hey, do you want to join me? We're doing an electric vehicle. Oh, that sounds familiar. Peter told me his vision, he said, I
want to take EVs to the next level, 2.0 of electrification. While the company has been driven by
a bold vision, financing it has been a challenge. In 2018, Lucid raised
one billion dollars from the Saudi wealth fund. We were able to show
the first prototype of Lucid Air back in late 2016. And then we had a
hiatus securing the right funding. Lucid did have some trouble finding funding
and they've had a lot of different ownership kind of
investments and states. They seem to be on the right
track now with the wealth fund investment. Might be enough to
get them to market. Lucid is going after the luxury market
first, similar to what Tesla did with the Roadster. If you look at
the space for luxury sedans, it's worth a hundred
billion dollars worldwide. If you wanted to buy an electric
luxury car in that space, there isn't wasn't one available. So we're going
directly into that white space with Lucid Air. One of the criticisms of Tesla
has been while the Model S in the Model X were certainly priced
in competition with Mercedes-Benz and BMW and Audi, they never
really felt like luxury vehicles. The Lucid Air, in contrast, they're at
least targeting having a level of luxury and premium feel that you would expect
at a price point of over a hundred thousand dollars. Lucid's first product is supposed to
be the Lucid Air sedan. We have seen a lot of
prototypes of it and concepts. There's a 35-inch curved display. So there's a lot of really
nice packaging things that they've done inside this to make it both
more functional but also more aesthetically attractive. The company's lineage is a
battery supplier to Formula E no doubt played a role in the
development of its battery tech. We've got over
900 volts architecture. We link that with our inverter
technology, which is silicon carbide, with a very special cooling system
which we developed entirely in-house, which keeps these chips super cool
before they can always generate any heat. So we're buying our cells from
LG Chem, t hey're our supply partner. But we're making the
battery packs entirely in-house because that pack technology is
one hundred percent Lucids. We're going for a
Lego brick, modular system. This architecture is designed the way
it is because it's super, super mass-producible. To have a long range you've
got to have a lot of battery. One way that you can start
to overcome that is to improve the efficiency, maximizing the number of miles
you get out of every kilowatt-hour of energy
in that battery. If Lucid lives up to the claims that
they've made of over a five hundred mile range for the top version of the
Air, then they'll be at least 14 percent better energy efficiency than the
best Tesla Model S today. Range is one of the
standout features of the Air. Tesla's Model S leads the industry
with a range of 402 miles. While other manufacturers can be anywhere
from 100 to 250 miles per charge. The Lucid Air is expected to
have a range of 517 miles. And Elon Musk recently unveiled the
Model S plaid, which Tesla claims has a range of over
520 miles per charge. In the electric vehicle space t he
name of the game is efficiency and range. That efficiency race will lead
to the $25,000 dollar EV. Recently at Tesla's 2020 Battery Day
event, Elon Musk revealed the company would produce a $25,000 EV
in 2023, citing developments in battery tech. This would finally
make electric car prices competitive with gas powered vehicles. One of the things that the Rawlinson
has emphasized is this idea of taking a holistic approach to the
entire propulsion system, the entire powertrain. Trying to optimize every
single component in there. Lucid is entering the market as a
premium brand with the intention of producing more affordable vehicles
down the road. The company's starting at the high end
of the spectrum, kind of how Tesla did with the Model S and promising
a future affordable vehicle down the line. We're starting with the Dream
Edition Lucid Air at a $169,000. We'll bring Air down to a
price point below $80,000 in 2022. I would love to be making a
more affordable car right now, we just can't do that as a new company. But we can start with a high-end
product with a modest factory and gradually move to a more
affordable segment of the market. The challenge is you actually have
to execute and make those initial vehicles profitable enough to generate enough
cash flow so you can introduce new models. And that's where Tesla really struggled
over the last 10 years. Focusing on the higher end does offer
some advantages when trying to get off the ground. You're going to
be focused on a lower volume. You're not trying to push four hundred
thousand of these out the door. We saw the trouble that Tesla had with
the ramp up of their Model 3 and just trying to get production smooth and
get the bugs worked out of the system. It takes time. The luxury
car market was valued at $497.8 billion in 2019 and is projected
to reach $ 735.8 billion by 2027. There's definitely a
market for premium vehicles. BMW and Mercedes sell about two
million vehicles a year each. However, the luxury sedan will be released
at a time when the market is moving towards SUVs and crossovers. As the market is moving towards SUVs
and crossovers, they chose to go out with a sedan, which is
a very traditional luxury vehicle. That can either be a positive for
Lucid because there aren't as many competitors entering that segment, or it
can mean that it's just trying to slice the pie too thin when
people are looking for crossovers and SUVs. The company does have
plans to develop an SUV. During the Lucid Air unveil event,
it revealed Project Gravity, its SUV concept built on the same
platform as the sedan. It's slated to come out in 2023. Electric vehicle maker Rivian also is
targeting the SUV market in addition to releasing a truck. Rivian is backed by
both Amazon and Ford. The Gravity project is going to feed
off of a huge amount of the technologies and the platform and
the tooling that we've already invested. Once you've gone through
the development of the skateboard itself, you have a much faster ability
to launch the next vehicle off of that. And costs is down as
well because the development costs already went into the skateboard platforms. Any electric vehicle company trying to
come to market right now, there are a lot of challenges. One of the biggest is charging. 83 percent of consumers who would not
consider buying an EV said it was because of battery life
and range anxiety. One of the advantages that Tesla
had was building out that Supercharger network early on. Unlike Tesla,
Lucid will leverage the Electrify America charging network that is being
built out by Volkswagen of America. They've incorporated a 900 volt
electrical system in the car so they can do 350 kilowatt charging, which
is even faster than even the latest version t hree Superchargers. Lucid is following Tesla with retail
spaces to sell directly to consumers, as opposed to
a franchise dealer model. We've signed leases on 14 stores. We'll have seven up and running
before the end of this year. And we'll have in the high 20s
by the end of twenty one. The challenge is the manufacturer that's
setting up this retail network has to make all that
investment in those physical properties. They also have to directly support
those vehicles with service when they need service. This is an area that
Tesla has really struggled with over the last several years since
they launched the Model 3. As their volumes have grown substantially,
they've struggled to keep up with the pace of providing
service to their customers. And Lucid intends to manage
service in-house as well. Service is an important aspect of
the connection with the consumer. It can make or break a
decision or a brand, essentially. Hopefully, I would assume Lucid will
learn from some of the mistakes Tesla made in that space. If you bring a prototype of something
to life that is better than anything that had been done before. That's an enormous task. Now, being able to replicate that and
being able to bring the cost of that one prototype, and prototypes, into
mass market is a whole 'nother animal. You've got this massive
factory that you're building, which includes battery components, you've got
the vehicle itself, the manufacturing of all this. That's a major cost. That's on top of all the
development that's already taken place. There's a strong potential that they're
going to burn through the billion dollar investment that they got
from the Saudi sovereign-wealth fund. Tesla is the best reference in the market
and it took a while for it to become profitable. If you look at
Tesla's ramp up curve for production, it's not easy and
things have gone wrong. Things have not been on time. They've been off by
months, if not years. If lucid can actually execute better as
a business, then there is a strong potential for them to succeed
w here Tesla struggled with that. Some other EV startups have partnered
with legacy automakers, a move which may alleviate some of
the stress of manufacturing. They don't have the advantage of something
like Rivian does, and that is the backing of Ford Motor
Company as well as Amazon. The next six months are going to be
super challenging a nd that's why I approach this with humility. We start production proper in spring
of twenty one and then we build the SUV, Project Gravity, and I
hope to get back into Casa Grande in twenty three. To bring the Air
and its other vehicles to market Lucid is building a factory
in Casa Grande, Arizona. The impressive and almost unique thing
is that Lucid's actually building a factory. You need a lot of backing
and you need a lot of talent to know how to actually build and
assemble the factory to be most efficient. In a few years time, it
will be good for nearly 400,000 units a year. This is a four-phase plan
to get there, and we're just about close to completing the first phase now,
which will get us to a factory which is good for
34,000 units a year. Lucid plans to deliver to the North
America market first, but the biggest demand may be outside it. Analysts predict record growth of sales
in 2021, especially in Europe and China. When you look at the
markets and look at where EVs are expected to grow the most, you're
looking at Western Europe, Europe in general and China. Majority of that reason is because
it's a regulatory driven push from government agencies. And then we go to Europe right at
the end of 2021, into early 2022. And then we hit China in 2022,
because that's the big prize, the largest market in the world. Some of
the vehicle configurations Lucid has planned may appeal to
the customers there. A lot of customers there, during the
week when they're going to the office, they'll hire a driver
to drive them around. And then on the weekends
they'll drive it themselves. And so what you find in the Chinese
market is a lot of manufacturers will actually offer special versions of
their premium vehicles, specifically for China that have a longer
wheelbase and more rear-seat leg room. I think China is going to
be absolutely huge for Lucid. Traditionally, it's been very much
more about the chauffeur driven rear-seat experience, but Lucid Air is
a great driver's car as well. So we cover both bases. Policy shifts may also start to
stir up the auto industry. Just recently, the governor of California
signed an executive order that all new vehicles sold in the state
must be zero emissions by 2035. But even if EV adoption continues to
grow, competition in the space is ramping up. Lucid is coming into
a very competitive market, the auto industry has always been
very competitive anyway. Especially now in the EV market, we're
seeing a lot of new entrants coming in. And then the incumbent
automakers are also introducing dozens of new EVs over
the next several years. No doubt Lucid will have
to contend with Tesla. Elon Musk has cemented the brand and a
loyal fan base in the world of electric vehicles. And in the U.S., Tesla made up about
80 percent of electric car sales in 2020 so far. It's going to be
interesting to see how this vehicle comes to market for the air and whether
or not they can attract the Tesla Model S buyer. Because the thing
is, people aren't buying EVs, they're buying Teslas. And while EV sales are
just 2.6 percent of vehicle sales, there's an opportunity to grow. Investor interest seems extremely high
in electric vehicle startups like Lucid. A lot of that has been the
Tesla effect and also the fear of missing out. They're definitely going to
be able to take advantage of growing interest in EVs. We're achieving incredible performance from
our cars, not for humongous battery packs, not from low-tech
solutions, but through high tech endeavors. That's what's really going
to change the world. And this needs to be a true
technology race and Lucid is in it.
Why does it always have to be an electric car company against Tesla? Would it not be more accurate to say "Lucid plan to take on ICE vehicles".
Tesla is not going anywhere and there is room for other electric car companies
Lucid's sector is luxury, which is different from Tesla. It competes with Tesla on the technology side.
Interesting. I didn't know Amazon had backed rivian.
I dont think Lucid will ever be as big as Telsa. But, both of them will be at the top of EV like Ford and Honda are with gas.
Did the narrator just pronounce Jaguar as Jaguire?😂
FSR is so ugly
ANSWER = whatever the entity that pays CNBC the most thinks. CNBC is and always will be just a shill.
Getting chauffeured to work, I like that idea 💡
6000 in CCIV And 1000 in tsla long