Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. This is Master's in
Speaker 1: Business with Barry red Holts on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 2: This week on the podcast What can I say about
Speaker 2: Peter Rawlinson? Not only is he the guy who developed
Speaker 2: the model S from a clean sheet of paper for Tesla,
Speaker 2: but he's the man behind Lucid. He joined as chief
Speaker 2: Technology Officer and eventually became CEO and drove the launch
Speaker 2: of the Lucid Air, probably the most awarded car in
Speaker 2: the modern era. It has sucked up every single accolade
Speaker 2: that you can have for either an electric or traditional car.
Speaker 2: Five hundred miles of range, twelve hundred horsepower on the
Speaker 2: top of the line. Not only that, they have a
Speaker 2: mid tier car that's about half the price of the
Speaker 2: six figure one. They're aiming to release an suv towards
Speaker 2: the end of this year, and a low cost car
Speaker 2: in the forty to fifty thousand dollars range in the
Speaker 2: coming years. This is a fascinating company. Rowlinson has an
Speaker 2: amazing history in the industry, Lotus, Jaguar, Tesler, and now Lucid.
Speaker 2: I thought this conversation was absolutely fascinating and I think
Speaker 2: you will also with no further ado my conversation with
Speaker 2: Peter Rawlinson.
Speaker 3: Great to be here, barring, great to have you.
Speaker 2: So let's start a little bit with your background. You
Speaker 2: went to Imperial College at the University of London. Was
Speaker 2: the career plan always automotive engineering or what were you thinking?
Speaker 3: I didn't know what I was going to do. I
Speaker 3: considered at school or something creative. I knew want to
Speaker 3: design things, and in the end I did a mechanical
Speaker 3: engineering course because it gave me the greatest optionality.
Speaker 2: Imperial College has some amazing alumni, Sir William Crooks who
Speaker 2: invented the vacuum tube, HG. Wells, Peter Higgs of Higgs Boson,
Speaker 2: Sir Alexander Fleming and Palinacillin. What was your experience like
Speaker 2: at Imperial College.
Speaker 3: Well, it was quite an experience for a kid from
Speaker 3: Wales in the big city.
Speaker 2: So let's talk a little bit about your automotive background.
Speaker 2: Chief engineer at Lotus Cars, Principal engineer Jaguar, two storied marquees.
Speaker 2: Tell us a little bit about your experience with both
Speaker 2: of those.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it was a wealth of experience. I
Speaker 3: think if we look at my days at Jaguar, it
Speaker 3: was a fascinating period because it was the dawn of
Speaker 3: the use of computers to design cars. Up to that time,
Speaker 3: cars had been designed on drawing.
Speaker 2: Boards manually pensilv.
Speaker 1: Parsley.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, we took in nineteen eighties and I was
Speaker 3: very fortunate that Jaguar made a big investment and a
Speaker 3: big push to pioneering the use of computer to digitally
Speaker 3: design a car and it never been done before.
Speaker 1: Seriously, I was.
Speaker 3: One of the first people in the UK to use
Speaker 3: CAD computer aided design prior to Jaguar, but it was
Speaker 3: a Jaguar that we really started using it in earnest
Speaker 3: and we used it in a joined up way with
Speaker 3: CAE computer aided Engineering, so we could do the stress
Speaker 3: analysis by finite element analysis, which was all new stuff.
Speaker 3: It was cutting edge, and we found a way of
Speaker 3: transferring files from colleague to colleague, from their computer, from
Speaker 3: terminal to terminal, and effectively we developed our own intranet,
Speaker 3: which is known as an intranet. Now, well this was
Speaker 3: long before the Internet. We didn't even have a name
Speaker 3: for it, and we were just transferring files and we
Speaker 3: created this methodology of a digital process to design a car,
Speaker 3: which was totally revolutionary in terms of how all the
Speaker 3: systems were designed, the plants, how the designs were shared digitally,
Speaker 3: and how they were analyzed computationally for stress and crash performance.
Speaker 2: So technology has been a core part of your process
Speaker 2: for bringing cars from a clean sheet to actually a
Speaker 2: sellable product totally.
Speaker 3: And I've been fortunate. I've always worked, until more recent
Speaker 3: years at the cutting edge in advanced engineering. I was
Speaker 3: responsible for advanced engineering at Lotus and at Jaguar was
Speaker 3: responsible for advanced body structure design.
Speaker 1: And it's that.
Speaker 3: Sort of technological advancement that is really central to my
Speaker 3: career and my being really.
Speaker 1: And also trying.
Speaker 3: To do kind of the impossible with very small teams
Speaker 3: of people, super smart people, very joined up, everyone knowing
Speaker 3: what's going on, in the power of kind of an
Speaker 3: elite team of really capable people, kind of like special Forces.
Speaker 2: I love that analogy. So you go from Jaguar and
Speaker 2: Lotus in twenty ten to Tesla as VP of Vehicle
Speaker 2: Engineering and chief engineer of the Tesla Model Less. When
Speaker 2: you arrived, that was a clean sheet piece of paper.
Speaker 3: Well, I actually I joined in February nine, way before
Speaker 3: twenty ten. It was formally announced quite a lot later.
Speaker 3: But I actually spoke to a guy called Leland Musk
Speaker 3: who called me an in England in January, and went
Speaker 3: out and met him in January nine, and I was
Speaker 3: there in the company in February nine. Long before there
Speaker 3: was a conceptual prototype of models.
Speaker 2: Back in those days, it was a little Lotus alon
Speaker 2: where they took out the engine and dropped in a
Speaker 2: bunch of batteries and electric motors. It's hard to imagine
Speaker 2: that that beginning eventually led to the Model S. And
Speaker 2: while the Model S is certainly long in the tooth,
Speaker 2: it's been around a while. When that car came out,
Speaker 2: it was pretty innovative and unique in the world. Tell
Speaker 2: us about your experience helping to develop the Model S,
Speaker 2: the car that arguably changed the entire automotive world totally.
Speaker 3: Well, it was a labor of love. I was working
Speaker 3: crazy hours, I working regular one hundred hours a week
Speaker 3: to achieve that against all odds. And so when I
Speaker 3: joined the company, start had already been made. They'd been
Speaker 3: working on it for about a year, and it was
Speaker 3: a false storm. It was never going to work. So
Speaker 3: I had a difficult decision to make the first week
Speaker 3: I was there, I had to go and tell my boss,
Speaker 3: my new boss, that really need to start again with
Speaker 3: a clean sheet, and he had the wisdom to agree
Speaker 3: with me, and so we started a fresh modthe less
Speaker 3: from the ground up, and that was probably the second
Speaker 3: week of February nine.
Speaker 2: And then the car comes out in twenty twelve.
Speaker 3: It was record time, and it was just it was
Speaker 3: a crazy because I mean I actually had a team
Speaker 3: of about six people to start with. Everyone had left
Speaker 3: and it was obvious I had to start from scratch,
Speaker 3: from a clean computer screen. So I had to hire
Speaker 3: the team, attract people to this company that no one
Speaker 3: had heard of, which no one gave a shot of
Speaker 3: being successful at There.
Speaker 2: Was certainly a lot of skepticism in the early.
Speaker 3: Year totally, and there was this misconception wasn't sufficient expertise
Speaker 3: and experience to do to do a car let alone,
Speaker 3: something which was really cutting edge. But actually having that
Speaker 3: clean sheet and having the authority the go ahead to
Speaker 3: recruit my team and hand pick my team, that's what
Speaker 3: changed everything, because I could actually hand pick an elite
Speaker 3: team of the best engineers in the world, and I
Speaker 3: called everyone i'd work from with before. That's why a
Speaker 3: lot of Brits came out and designed models. It was
Speaker 3: very much an international effort, but a lot of British
Speaker 3: people because there's people I knew from my paths from
Speaker 3: Jaguar exactly exactly, and it's sort of really we set
Speaker 3: up Teslo Engineering. There wasn't a place to do it,
Speaker 3: and I was actually working in SpaceX. I had my
Speaker 3: SpaceX security parts and I found that the second floor
Speaker 3: of SpaceX was unused. It was early days at SpaceX.
Speaker 3: I was just concrete floor. Let's say, can I have this.
Speaker 3: Let's set up Teslo Engineering upstairs in SpaceX.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: And we rolled some gray carpet do put some desks
Speaker 3: there and about probably about twenty of us actually designed
Speaker 3: the model less from the ground up through two thousand
Speaker 3: and nine, and then eventually I grew the team to
Speaker 3: about one hundred and fifty people through that three year period.
Speaker 3: But it was a fascinating time. It was when Tesla
Speaker 3: was at the cutting edge. And the interesting thing was
Speaker 3: the person who drove me the most was myself, because
Speaker 3: here I had this incredible opportunity in life to show
Speaker 3: what was possible and show what I could do. And
Speaker 3: really one of the main weapons I had was digital
Speaker 3: engineering to take everything I'd learned about cutting edge computational
Speaker 3: engineering and simulation, digital wind tunnel, digital everything. So therefore
Speaker 3: we could actually go later on prototypes and effectively go
Speaker 3: for computational prototypes tens of thousands of times to get
Speaker 3: things right. So when we actually built a proper prototype,
Speaker 3: and the first proper prototype was late twenty ten, relatively late.
Speaker 3: And this was a core philosophy of my engineering process
Speaker 3: to really turn things on the head. Normally there's an
Speaker 3: emphasis on getting an early prototype so you can learn
Speaker 3: early with your mistakes. My process was the absolute antithesis.
Speaker 3: Make all your mistakes on the computer, tested one thousand times,
Speaker 3: ten thousand times, and then cut the metal when you're
Speaker 3: damn sure, relatively late, and that prototype will be really good.
Speaker 3: And that's what we did, and that's how we reduced
Speaker 3: the time scale, and that car was in production three
Speaker 3: and a half years from the day I said, right,
Speaker 3: let's design it from scratch, back in February two thousand
Speaker 3: and nine.
Speaker 2: So we're going to talk a little bit more about
Speaker 2: Tesla later, but you said something that caught my ear.
Speaker 2: At the time, the nine to twelve era Tesla was
Speaker 2: at the cutting edge. You're implying they're no longer at
Speaker 2: the cutting edge. Is that the case?
Speaker 3: I think that the mantle has passed to Lucid. I
Speaker 3: think Lucid is now at the cutting edge. I think
Speaker 3: we are the company with a true sense of mission.
Speaker 3: This week, I was proud to announce that we've created
Speaker 3: a landmark number in the development of the ev which
Speaker 3: is going to have a profound impact upon the planet,
Speaker 3: and that is achieving five miles of range per kilar.
Speaker 1: What tower of energy.
Speaker 2: That's a giant efficiency.
Speaker 1: It's a giant to leap forward.
Speaker 2: Like a lot of the cars out there are two
Speaker 2: ish if they're lucky three two.
Speaker 3: You're very well versed in this barrier. Absolutely my car, guys,
Speaker 3: you know your stuff. And why this is important is
Speaker 3: that we need to address the barriers to widespread adoption
Speaker 3: of electric car. And the first barrier, it was range anxiety.
Speaker 3: When we launched Lucid Air in the autumn the fall
Speaker 3: of twenty one, we had a range of five twenty
Speaker 3: miles with our very first product. Nobody believed it as possible,
Speaker 3: and we did that with the modest battery size. It
Speaker 3: wasn't a cumongous It wasn't dumb range with just stuffing
Speaker 3: loads of anyone can do that. And you know this
Speaker 3: is this is cutting edge stuff. And why this is
Speaker 3: important is the next barrier to widespread adoption is the
Speaker 3: cost of ownership, the cost of an EV. Why why
Speaker 3: not everybody jumping to EV's now? It's because of cost.
Speaker 3: And if you look at the breakdown of the cost
Speaker 3: of building the bill of materials all the parts that
Speaker 3: you put into an EV. For a high end EV,
Speaker 3: about thirty seven percent of that value is the battery pack.
Speaker 3: But for a more affordable family car it's over forty percent.
Speaker 3: There is no gasoline engine car equivalent to this balance
Speaker 3: of cost. So what we are doing at LUCID is
Speaker 3: addressing the cost of the batteries, and we're doing it
Speaker 3: in an unorthodox way rather than saying, right, can we
Speaker 3: make batteries cheaper through an economy of scale, or actually
Speaker 3: saying do we need that many batteries in the first place?
Speaker 3: Can we go further with higher technology? We've reinvented the
Speaker 3: electric motor, we've reinvented the inverter to go further with
Speaker 3: less batteries in the first place. And so if you
Speaker 3: look at our products today. If you look at the
Speaker 3: Loociderer Pure, we're able to do the car that's in
Speaker 3: production right now. For any journey you take from A
Speaker 3: to B, whether it's from home to the office, down
Speaker 3: the shops, on your vocation, you will use less electricity
Speaker 3: to go from A to B than any other car
Speaker 3: on the market today, par none. And because it's the
Speaker 3: most efficient, and because you're able to use less electricity,
Speaker 3: not only will it cost you less as a user,
Speaker 3: but it means you don't have to carry such a
Speaker 3: large battery pack around, and that means better use of
Speaker 3: the world's precious resources. Less minds for lithium, nickel, cobalt,
Speaker 3: less dependence geopolitically in this world for the US, and
Speaker 3: this is of a profound significance. We can go further
Speaker 3: with less through technology.
Speaker 2: Let's talk a little bit about what led you to
Speaker 2: join Lucid. You helped bring out the Models. You're chief
Speaker 2: engineer of the Models project when you were at Tesla.
Speaker 2: So let's start with that car. Not only did you
Speaker 2: bring it to market incredibly quick, it won multiple awards
Speaker 2: Onomabile Magazine, Automobile of the Year, Motor Trend, Car the Year,
Speaker 2: All sorts, of big wins. What made the model ass
Speaker 2: so successful.
Speaker 3: I think it was a big picture thinking and right
Speaker 3: down to detailed execution. To have both, I think you
Speaker 3: need to have a strategic oversight of joined up thinking
Speaker 3: of how systems interact relative to each other as a
Speaker 3: complete ecosystem, and then you need to have that loving
Speaker 3: attention to detail at I mean, there was there was
Speaker 3: a there was a well known for my mantra that
Speaker 3: every millimeter counts, and I felt that every gram counts,
Speaker 3: particularly with an electric car, where every every duel of
Speaker 3: the energy is a precious commodity. So it was really
Speaker 3: a very interesting intellectual puzzle because when I arrived at
Speaker 3: Tesla in February nine, prior to my arrival, friends von Holtsaersen,
Speaker 3: who was the design chief, arrived around I think it
Speaker 3: was about Autumn eight, no August eight, and before I
Speaker 3: had arrived, the exterior styling design the shape of models
Speaker 3: had been signed off on approved by between Frances and Elon,
Speaker 3: and that was pretty well predetermined before I arrived. Now
Speaker 3: that set in stone effectively the outer shape constraint the
Speaker 3: parameters that I as an engineer could work to. Now
Speaker 3: that's very different from how we approach Lucida, and I
Speaker 3: can go on to that later, but this presented a
Speaker 3: very interesting and compelling intellectual puzzle, a three D puzzle.
Speaker 3: How was I going to fit all the battery cells
Speaker 3: in to give that car, to endow that car with
Speaker 3: sufficient range? How was I going to fit in motors, transmission,
Speaker 3: drive shafts, suspension people, packaged leg room, crumple zones, cooling,
Speaker 3: just space for luggage, all of that within that predetermined
Speaker 3: out of shape because it'd been signed off, and I
Speaker 3: realized within a millisecond that that that wasn't going to
Speaker 3: change much. So it was a fascinating three dimental puzzle.
Speaker 3: It was like a tetrix on steroids, tetras on steroids.
Speaker 3: To solve how we were going to fit all these
Speaker 3: parts in the car. And I can give you. I
Speaker 3: can give you a very interesting example. We wanted to
Speaker 3: have a flat floor in the car to differentiate it
Speaker 3: no transmission tunnel inside the cabin and traditional car's got
Speaker 3: a transmission tunnel.
Speaker 1: At the rear.
Speaker 3: And because that is an obstruction to comfort for the.
Speaker 2: Occupants middle seat in the back, Oh.
Speaker 3: Who absolutely exactly, And so there was a design to
Speaker 3: have a fully flat floor but one of the big
Speaker 3: loads that you have to design force structurally in a
Speaker 3: car at the seat belt seat belt pull tests, particularly
Speaker 3: the lower anchor points which goes through the seat and
Speaker 3: through the seat mountains into the floor, and so flat
Speaker 3: sheet metal floor wouldn't have been strong enough. So it's
Speaker 3: very clear we have to link the battery pack structure
Speaker 3: under the floor through and make the battery pack contribute
Speaker 3: to the seat belt strength. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So the
Speaker 3: seat belt load to go through the floor through a
Speaker 3: long bolt through the cross member which is in the
Speaker 3: battery pack, and these had to go in a specific
Speaker 3: location where the people fitted, and so that starts determining
Speaker 3: where you can put the cross members in the battery pack.
Speaker 3: So when I started laying out the architecture of all
Speaker 3: the cells fitted in that battery pack, I noticed that
Speaker 3: we could actually divide that into seven elements along the
Speaker 3: rocker section and we'd be able to get these cross
Speaker 3: members in precisely the right point. And why this is
Speaker 3: a very interesting example of joined up thinking is that
Speaker 3: then led to the design of the module of the
Speaker 3: battery pack, and we ended up with sixteen modules of
Speaker 3: four ndred and five fifty cells on the model less
Speaker 3: and actually it had a determining factor upon the voltage
Speaker 3: that the car ran at.
Speaker 1: Can you believe that.
Speaker 3: The sequel anchorage structural loads starts splitting up the pack
Speaker 3: into discrete modules, which influenced the electrical voltage. One thing
Speaker 3: truly joined up thinking.
Speaker 2: One thing leads to the next, which leads to the next,
Speaker 2: and every decision you make has ramifications everything else totally.
Speaker 3: And it's not the only thing. Because we knew we
Speaker 3: were we didn't have silicon carbide switching technology in those days,
Speaker 3: so we were using insulated gate bipolar transistors, which was
Speaker 3: limiting us to you know, around four twenty four thirty folds.
Speaker 3: So we knew what sort of range of and we
Speaker 3: knew there could be some peak overloads, that voltage spikes
Speaker 3: that we had to cover for. So we knew roughly
Speaker 3: the voltage range that we could hit. But it was
Speaker 3: sort of absolutely consistent with that how many cells can
Speaker 3: we fit because each cell had amount of energy and
Speaker 3: so the number of cells will determine the range of
Speaker 3: the vehicles. He wanted to get us to maximize that
Speaker 3: as well, and even the gaps between the cells, and
Speaker 3: I was able to do that without changing the wheelbase
Speaker 3: of the car from the original design, which was quite
Speaker 3: an achievement, I can tell you.
Speaker 2: So now let me pull you back from the engineering
Speaker 2: wonkiness you come off of the giant success of the
Speaker 2: Model S. What made you decide, Hey, that was fun,
Speaker 2: let me go elsewhere and start with a clean sheet,
Speaker 2: rather than stay at Tesla and work on whatever their
Speaker 2: next vehicle was.
Speaker 3: I'd glad you ask me that, because there's a actually
Speaker 3: there's a sort of interlude between the two. So while
Speaker 3: I was doing all this, my mom, my mother was
Speaker 3: living in England, and she's a widow, and she was
Speaker 3: in her nineties and her health was failing, and I
Speaker 3: just had to go back. So I resigned my position
Speaker 3: at Tesla in January twenty twenty. Was I went home
Speaker 3: for Christmas end of twenty eleven and it was clear
Speaker 3: that mum needed me, and so crazy I gave up
Speaker 3: my job at Tesla, flying around with El on his
Speaker 3: jet and I went home and I was literally cooking
Speaker 3: dinner and washing the dishes for more and then her felt.
Speaker 3: It's only when she passed that I really came out
Speaker 3: and joined a little company and set up Lucid from.
Speaker 2: It So were there any regrets after not going back
Speaker 2: to Tesla? What did Elon say to you? You were
Speaker 2: a key person for the success of the Model Ass.
Speaker 2: He recruited you. How did he feel when you said
Speaker 2: I'm going to do something else.
Speaker 3: Well, he did have the good christ to ring me
Speaker 3: up and asked me to come back, but it was
Speaker 3: my decision was made.
Speaker 2: So what was it like working for Musk? He's got
Speaker 2: a little bit of a reputation. How was your relationship?
Speaker 2: How did he affect what the Model Ass turned out
Speaker 2: to be?
Speaker 1: So it's very interesting.
Speaker 3: I think there was a common narrative that he pushes
Speaker 3: everyone his subordinates really hard.
Speaker 2: True.
Speaker 3: I never had that experience, really because I pushed myself
Speaker 3: so crazy how to do it that there was someone
Speaker 3: pushing me harder than he ever could, and it was
Speaker 3: me because I'd had years and years of wanting to
Speaker 3: do something like a model less and I could never
Speaker 3: have done it at say Jakie or Lotus. But what
Speaker 3: I had was the freedom of picking hand picking brilliant engineers,
Speaker 3: and he was totally aligned with that. We totally had
Speaker 3: a shared vision and SpaceX was built upon that. And
Speaker 3: I was working in SpaceX that one in great engineers
Speaker 3: worth one hundred mediocre people. It's all about how can
Speaker 3: you track the best brains on the planet to come
Speaker 3: up with a sense of mission. And that's what I did.
Speaker 3: And actually I remember I actually even had a math
Speaker 3: test for all my candidates and it was like, never mind,
Speaker 3: what qualifications You've got to do.
Speaker 1: This math with me? People.
Speaker 3: I've thought them all through the ringer and I personally
Speaker 3: into everyone. And actually I built Lucid that way. I mean,
Speaker 3: I don't know, I don't these days, but if you
Speaker 3: look at the core capability, the core engineering talent at Lucid,
Speaker 3: and many of them been with me for many, many years,
Speaker 3: and a lot of my Tesla modelesque team came across
Speaker 3: with me. And literally we've got hundreds of people have
Speaker 3: come across from Tesla to Lucid. Lucy's like a beacon
Speaker 3: of light now that hundreds of people have come across
Speaker 3: and and they've drawn to this flame that we are
Speaker 3: going to be the best technically, whatever whatever it takes.
Speaker 2: We're going to get into Lucid in a few moments.
Speaker 2: But you mentioned space, ax, I have to ask you
Speaker 2: a question. Not only is Elon running Elon Musk running Tesla,
Speaker 2: he's running space Ax, he's running Twitter or ostensible if
Speaker 2: he handed it off to somebody, but it's pretty clear
Speaker 2: he's still very involved. He's running Xai. That's four companies.
Speaker 2: How can one person successfully manage running for a company?
Speaker 2: Steve Jobs ran Apple and Pixar, and he was pretty
Speaker 2: hands off at Pixar.
Speaker 3: Well, I think there is a worrying distraction there, and
Speaker 3: I think that's why the mental has been passed to Lucid.
Speaker 3: I pledge to my whole team, my investors, all our
Speaker 3: shareholders that I'm fully committed to Lucid alone and I'm
Speaker 3: all in. I'm just one, one task, one company. And
Speaker 3: that's probably why you hardly ever see me in the media,
Speaker 3: because it requires that degree of commitment to set up
Speaker 3: a car company.
Speaker 2: So the implication is if you're running for companies. And
Speaker 2: I don't want to put words in your mouth, but
Speaker 2: are you implying he has taken his eye off the
Speaker 2: ball at Tesla?
Speaker 3: I think that you've got to look at who is
Speaker 3: now leading technically. I mean, we've got the highest voltage car,
Speaker 3: We've got the most efficient, we've got the most aerodynamic,
Speaker 3: we've got the longest range, Who've got the highest performance.
Speaker 3: We've got the best battery engineering, We've got the most
Speaker 3: advanced motor controlled algorithms. I think we've got the best
Speaker 3: battery management system control system on the planet. If you
Speaker 3: look at all the breakthroughs that we're making, it's very
Speaker 3: clear that back in two thousand and nine to twenty twelve,
Speaker 3: Tesla was doing that, and today right now it's Lucive
Speaker 3: that's doing it. And someone needs to carry this torch
Speaker 3: forward for the benefit of all humanity, and we're happy
Speaker 3: to do that.
Speaker 2: To me, the thing that perplexes me more than anything
Speaker 2: about Elon Musk is if my product that I am
Speaker 2: trying to sell is supposedly going to reduce global carbon
Speaker 2: emissions and and adapt to better outcome for global warming,
Speaker 2: why tack hard to the right and get in bed
Speaker 2: with people who think global warming is a hoax? Like
Speaker 2: your client base, are people concerned about global warming? I
Speaker 2: don't understand the whole right wing trolling, crazy sort of
Speaker 2: stuff that's happened over the past year with him. You've
Speaker 2: watched him. I know it's been a good long time,
Speaker 2: but any explanation for what's going on there.
Speaker 3: Well, I think it's a worrisome trend of distraction. I'm
Speaker 3: an engineer and a scientist, and I believe is compelling,
Speaker 3: overwhelming evidence that global warming is real. It's happening all
Speaker 3: around us. You'd have to be blind not to see that.
Speaker 3: And I'm only committed to doing all I can. I
Speaker 3: will not rest to use my life energy to try
Speaker 3: to help this generation in future general. And this is
Speaker 3: the sense of mission that we carry at LUCID to
Speaker 3: really advance the adoption of sustainable mobility, and we have
Speaker 3: to do that with a sense of utter urgency, and
Speaker 3: these distractions have no place in that mission for me.
Speaker 2: Really interesting when the Model S came out, I know
Speaker 2: it was less than five years to make it, but
Speaker 2: it seemed as if the technology built into the Model
Speaker 2: S was ten years ahead of everybody else, maybe seven years,
Speaker 2: but nothing else was like that in terms of the
Speaker 2: over the year updates, the interface, the visual camera system,
Speaker 2: the self driving. How big of a lead in any
Speaker 2: of those technologies does Tesla have or are you suggesting
Speaker 2: that they're pretty much number two or worse in all
Speaker 2: of those technologies.
Speaker 3: Virtually that you've mentioned there behind us that we're about
Speaker 3: four years ahead of Tesla. I would say that in
Speaker 3: terms of autonomous driving capability, they're marginally ahead of us,
Speaker 3: but not a long way. They're not at Level three,
Speaker 3: they're at a level two plus something. They're a little
Speaker 3: bit ahead of us, but that's very deliberate. I've chosen
Speaker 3: to be a fast follower. But if you look at
Speaker 3: just about everything else, we are significantly ahead in the
Speaker 3: core powatrain technologies and also some of the I mean
Speaker 3: you mentioned over the air. I let me give you
Speaker 3: an example in terms of that when we launched Lucid
Speaker 3: and a lot of people don't know this, we launched Lucid
Speaker 3: Air in the fall of twenty twenty one with a
Speaker 3: revolutionary twelve volt architecture that we embodied a Nodle Ethernet
Speaker 3: data super highway in the car. That was in twenty one.
Speaker 3: More recently, Tesla's finally got to that with the cyber truck.
Speaker 3: But that many people don't realize. They think it's an
Speaker 3: innovation of cyber truck. It's actually Tesla did it too,
Speaker 3: and a bit years after Lucid did. Lucid innovated with
Speaker 3: that and Tesla followed. If you look at our ota capability,
Speaker 3: it's without power. Yes, over the air updates. We've done
Speaker 3: about seventy five eighty updates. They're coming regularly, thick and fast.
Speaker 3: And let me give you an example. We can actually
Speaker 3: we've pioneered a type of over the air update which
Speaker 3: is unique. That is a diagnostic tool. So there's something
Speaker 3: new that's gone wrong with one of the supplier's parts,
Speaker 3: we can lab test for a test proceded that would
Speaker 3: identify the nature of the fault. Then we can code
Speaker 3: that test in our algorithms and we can over the
Speaker 3: air that And we've actually done this, so it's almost
Speaker 3: like getting a dose of penicillin that the car gets
Speaker 3: and it can actually self dying moves and determine if
Speaker 3: there is a new fault from the supplier. This is
Speaker 3: cutting edge stuff. And more recently, as part of the
Speaker 3: seminal announcement this week that I made that we're going
Speaker 3: to get to five miles per kilater. Part of that,
Speaker 3: a part of that is hardware, but a chunk of
Speaker 3: that advancement is due to some new motor control software
Speaker 3: and we will be over the air relaying that transmitting
Speaker 3: that to.
Speaker 1: All our fleet.
Speaker 2: So in other words, you're going to improve the efficiency
Speaker 2: of previously sold car totally and they'll step up to five.
Speaker 3: They won't all, but they will all improve that incremental
Speaker 3: part which is due to that software, the effect of
Speaker 3: that particular software. It's only a car that we're going
Speaker 3: to launch very soon we'll have the Magic five, but
Speaker 3: they'll all benefit from this.
Speaker 2: Huh. Really interesting Again, I don't want to put words
Speaker 2: in your mouth, but I'm going to repeat what you
Speaker 2: said in your polite British ways in my course American ways.
Speaker 2: Elon Musk is running four companies. He's distracted. Tesla was
Speaker 2: the leader in all these technologies battery, motors, software, over
Speaker 2: the air, down the road and other than self driving.
Speaker 2: They have lost the mantle of leadership. It sounds like
Speaker 2: you're saying across the board in ev technology.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let me give you some metrics.
Speaker 3: If you look at for many years we supplied the
Speaker 3: batteries to the World Championship for Electric motor Sport.
Speaker 2: This is related to the deal with Aston Martin.
Speaker 3: Quite separate, quite separates, and we used all that knowledge
Speaker 3: from four years of successful motor racing to all the
Speaker 3: teams in the World Championship for Electric Motorsport that we
Speaker 3: supplied the batteries. For all that expertise has been embodied
Speaker 3: in our battery management system are BMS and our battery
Speaker 3: systems in our current CUS and actually right today we
Speaker 3: supply the front drive unit, the inverter and motor and
Speaker 3: transmission in the nose of all those race cars. That
Speaker 3: is the most advanced unit in the world today. It
Speaker 3: is nearly fifteen horsepower per kilogram. If you look at
Speaker 3: what Tesla is doing with its PLAID technology, it's about
Speaker 3: three point nine horse power per kilogram.
Speaker 1: This is four x yes, And if you.
Speaker 3: Look at our mainstream production technology that we put in
Speaker 3: listed air, we get up to nine horse power per kilogram.
Speaker 3: Plaid is three point nine. It's not like we're thirty
Speaker 3: percent to hent Huh.
Speaker 2: Really really interesting. So the old philosophy of race on Sunday,
Speaker 2: sell on Monday is still kind of real indeed.
Speaker 3: And do you know what, Barry, what's remarkable about this?
Speaker 3: I think that adage was true in the in the
Speaker 3: thirties and forties and the fifties. But I've been in
Speaker 3: vanced engineering in road cars all my life. I've always
Speaker 3: thought it doesn't happen what goes on the race car.
Speaker 3: The technology never comes back in and finally I've had
Speaker 3: it happen and it's genuine. What we've learned on the
Speaker 3: racetrack with our battery technology is embodied in every Lucid
Speaker 3: air we've ever made.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about what took place in your post
Speaker 2: Tesla career. You join Lucid as a CTO. What responsibilities
Speaker 2: come with that role at an EV shop?
Speaker 3: A lot of responsibility for the product, for the complete car, engineering, the.
Speaker 2: Vehicle, everything batteries, motors, and everything across software, across the board.
Speaker 2: I don't think a lot of people realized that Lucid
Speaker 2: began a long time ago as at Tiva. I'm not
Speaker 2: pronouncing it right, it was an electric battery maker. How
Speaker 2: do you explain that that transition from just making electric
Speaker 2: batteries to saying, oh, let's let's become an EV manufacturer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I think there was a recognition that
Speaker 3: there wasn't a true value proposition in just approaching that.
Speaker 1: Actually, Tesla in the.
Speaker 3: Early days had a similar approach that it was only
Speaker 3: later they thought, well, really that the car is the
Speaker 3: true value generator. So I was approached, would I like
Speaker 3: to join this little company which really had very little
Speaker 3: at the time.
Speaker 2: And they had launched in like two thousand and six.
Speaker 3: They've been a long long time, so I was I
Speaker 3: was approached much later than that, and it wasn't until
Speaker 3: twenty sixty that we really created Lucid and really focused
Speaker 3: on creating the Lucid.
Speaker 1: Air, the best car in the world.
Speaker 3: And you know, it was very clear to me that
Speaker 3: we'd have to change the name and relaunches at a
Speaker 3: different brand that was more customer oriented in facing. So
Speaker 3: Lucid was founded and created by a small group of
Speaker 3: us in twenty sixteen out of the Little Mattery Company,
Speaker 3: which had been round for a long time. And that's
Speaker 3: when we really got serious.
Speaker 2: So the co founder and the CEO of Lucid retires,
Speaker 2: you're tapped to jump into that role both as CEO
Speaker 2: and CTO. What was it like stepping into a place
Speaker 2: a founder.
Speaker 4: Well, there was a tortuous transition at one stage, but
Speaker 4: by that time, by sixteen so many of my former
Speaker 4: Tesla team had come across to join me with this
Speaker 4: mission to create a better car, and I'd been joined by.
Speaker 3: Some key players in the team, Derek Jenkins from Mazda.
Speaker 3: I persuaded Jack Derek to give up his job as
Speaker 3: design director from Malazda North America and joined to head
Speaker 3: up the design studio. Eric Bach came along who is
Speaker 3: his now my chief engineer and senior vice president of
Speaker 3: product and Engineering. And these are both brilliant, brilliant people
Speaker 3: who joined me pretty well in the early days and
Speaker 3: they were through this period with me and as a
Speaker 3: little team we created Lucid and we launched Lucid Air.
Speaker 3: It was December sixteen, and then it was clear we
Speaker 3: needed to have some serious money to put this thing
Speaker 3: into production.
Speaker 2: He raised a lot of capital over the years.
Speaker 3: Oh yes, yes, and it requires a lot of capital.
Speaker 3: And then we had a lean period through seventeen and
Speaker 3: into eighteen where we couldn't find any funding. But we
Speaker 3: had what turned out to be a very interesting card
Speaker 3: that had been played because in sixteen I became friendly
Speaker 3: with the CEO at McLaren and over a cup of
Speaker 3: tea in England in the McLaren Tech Center, English style,
Speaker 3: we decided that we'd enter the world of electric race cars.
Speaker 3: And McLaren recognized that they've got great race car experience,
Speaker 3: but they didn't have the battery pack experience. But we've
Speaker 3: got the battery experience expertise.
Speaker 2: So let's talk a little bit about that battery pack.
Speaker 2: It's scalable, it's modular. Yes, it continued to iterate based
Speaker 2: on race experience. How much of an advantage is the
Speaker 2: Lucid battery pack versus other EV makers.
Speaker 3: It's a significant advantage. But the biggest advantage in terms
Speaker 3: of our range and efficiency is not the pack, and
Speaker 3: this is it's the motor and invert and the complete
Speaker 3: drawing units.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about that because and I'm gonna take
Speaker 2: a look at an engineering drawing. But when I look
Speaker 2: at at some of the internals for the engine, the motor,
Speaker 2: and I still say engine out of habit, but the
Speaker 2: motor and the transmission are integrated into one and the
Speaker 2: axle transmission goes straight through it, and so there's no differentials,
Speaker 2: there's no there's a lot of things that come out
Speaker 2: of the vehicle with this very small, very lightweight, yet
Speaker 2: high horsepower, high efficiency motor. Tell us a little bit
Speaker 2: about the engineering behind.
Speaker 1: That, Okay, okay. So one of the.
Speaker 3: The disadvantages when we were in model ass was that
Speaker 3: there were two different teams. One was doing the transmission,
Speaker 3: another was doing the motor. So JB Struggles team was
Speaker 3: doing the motion and I was doing the trends mission,
Speaker 3: and so you've got two different groups and where the
Speaker 3: two join.
Speaker 1: Is a weakness.
Speaker 3: So when I set up LUCID, it was clear we
Speaker 3: needed to reinvent the electric motor. And I can't tell
Speaker 3: you Barry that at the time that seemed crazy.
Speaker 2: It seems crazy. You're just saying it right now, you're smiling,
Speaker 2: because what do you mean You want.
Speaker 3: To tell you why there was a perception that you
Speaker 3: couldn't make a better electric motor, that electric motors are
Speaker 3: so much more efficient than gasoline cars. That it's done.
Speaker 3: It was designed in the Victorian area, and that was it.
Speaker 3: And it is true that electric motors can be very
Speaker 3: highly efficient. If you put one in an air conditioning tube,
Speaker 3: you run at a set speed and set load, it
Speaker 3: can be right on that peak spot of efficiency. But
Speaker 3: that efficiency trails off dramatically in any side of that spot.
Speaker 3: And if you look at electric car people don't often
Speaker 3: realize that cargoes faster ofs lower. When the motor goes
Speaker 3: faster or slow, that's what determines how fast you go,
Speaker 3: how fast the motor is spinning, and how much you accelerate,
Speaker 3: that's how much talk is being developed from the motor,
Speaker 3: how much power is being released, and the antithesis under
Speaker 3: regenerative braking. And so the task is to create a
Speaker 3: motor and inverter system and transmission that's got a much
Speaker 3: broader bandwidth of efficiency. And this wasn't even the It
Speaker 3: wasn't wasn't it wasn't even considered possible. I don't think
Speaker 3: anyone was thinking of it.
Speaker 2: And you also not only made the motor more efficient,
Speaker 2: but you integrated the transmission to the motor.
Speaker 3: Wen So the electrocmotor has got two parts as the
Speaker 3: fixed bit which is called the stata very simple, and
Speaker 3: the lit that spins in the middle, which is called
Speaker 3: the rotor. And the rotor really provides power as a
Speaker 3: result of how fast it spins and the talk that
Speaker 3: it transmits at that spin speed.
Speaker 1: And if you look at.
Speaker 3: Something that transmits tool like a propeller shaft in a car.
Speaker 3: You're a car guy, you know prop shaft, So hollow
Speaker 3: the tubellion because that's what's required.
Speaker 1: You want to be exactly and you.
Speaker 3: Learn that the metal in the middle does very little.
Speaker 3: That's why it's hollowed out. So I started asking, well,
Speaker 3: what does the metal in the middle of a rotor
Speaker 3: do if it's trying to transmit talk and it's electromagnetic,
Speaker 3: why does it We have to have these solid rotors,
Speaker 3: why can't we hollow them out more? Well, the answer
Speaker 3: is it does very little. We can hollow that. It
Speaker 3: should be like a tube. And then we start thinking
Speaker 3: what we can get in. And I have a brilliant
Speaker 3: engineer as a team on. My engineer and my team
Speaker 3: called Balash Palfi's Hungarian who came up with this integrating
Speaker 3: a microdifferential inside. And this was all enabled by my
Speaker 3: brilliant motor engineer, doctor Inma Dlala.
Speaker 1: And I put them.
Speaker 3: Both together to sit together and I said, look, guys,
Speaker 3: I don't want to have a separate motor and transmission team.
Speaker 3: I want to consider a motor transmission as a single
Speaker 3: rotary inertial system with total I want to think of
Speaker 3: it as a single unit. I want a motor transmission unit.
Speaker 3: And you might think, why do you even need gears, Well,
Speaker 3: you need gears because the wheels of a car are
Speaker 3: quite large compared with the diameter of electric motor, so
Speaker 3: you need to provide that attractive force at the contact
Speaker 3: patch of the tire, and the bigger you make the wheel,
Speaker 3: the less force you're going to have for a given talk.
Speaker 3: So you do need to have a reduction set. So
Speaker 3: we launched Lucid Air with a ratio of seven point
Speaker 3: oh six to one. Models was nine point zho to one.
Speaker 3: We went to seven point zho six to one Air
Speaker 3: and we compromise a little bit on not to sixty,
Speaker 3: but we got better mid range performance. And I always
Speaker 3: wanted mid more mid range acceleration and efficiency. I wasn't
Speaker 3: going to be racing naught to sixty with it, and
Speaker 3: so that's why we went to a seven point oh
Speaker 3: six to one ratio.
Speaker 2: What's the power to weight ratio of that integraated and
Speaker 2: so very compact motor and integrated Well.
Speaker 3: If you look at the whole unit, there's a drive unit,
Speaker 3: inverter motor and transmission the whole thing with the differential,
Speaker 3: it's nine point zero horsepower.
Speaker 2: Per Kilogram's substantial.
Speaker 3: It's substantial, but it's it's it's it's more like twenty
Speaker 3: at motor level, and if you look at the elements
Speaker 3: within the motor, it's more like twenty five. If you
Speaker 3: actually cut away the motor. So often people attribute that
Speaker 3: to the motor, but it's not. The motor is about
Speaker 3: thirty two to thirty three kilograms of the seventy four
Speaker 3: kilograms of the complete unit.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about what making that so relatively small
Speaker 2: and light does to the design of the car. Not
Speaker 2: only are we not talking about the hump in the
Speaker 2: back seat or even in the front seat, but by
Speaker 2: making that motor so small, the floor panel of the
Speaker 2: car can be elatively flat, the wheels can be pushed
Speaker 2: further out to the corner, and the interior cabin becomes
Speaker 2: much more substantial for a car of this size.
Speaker 3: That's right, but we'd done all that with models. But
Speaker 3: what we hadn't done, and this was the impossible step.
Speaker 3: And because electric motors were inherently much smaller than gasoline
Speaker 3: V eights and the like and didn't need all these
Speaker 3: drive shlves, we had all those advantages with model less.
Speaker 3: But what I asked was kind of the unthinkable that Lucid, Well,
Speaker 3: we know that the drive unit, electric motor and drive
Speaker 3: unit is a lot smaller. What if we really explored
Speaker 3: how small we can make this thing? Why don't we
Speaker 3: just go crazy? Let's see how compact we can make this,
Speaker 3: because if we could make it even more compact, we
Speaker 3: could have an even more profound impact upon the design
Speaker 3: of the car. And that's when I took perhaps Lucid's
Speaker 3: greatest gamble. And this is why I could never done
Speaker 3: this in a conventional car company, because what we did
Speaker 3: was whilst one team set off, my motor and inverter
Speaker 3: and transmission team set off to truly miniiturize that drive unit,
Speaker 3: the rest of the company, the rest of the engineering
Speaker 3: and design teams. We're designing Lucid Air as a car
Speaker 3: with enough leng room, transformative length, room and comfort in
Speaker 3: interior space, but much smaller on the outside, much more aerodynamic,
Speaker 3: and much sleeaker.
Speaker 2: It's an insized car with the room of car car.
Speaker 3: To full size. Its interior space is longer than a
Speaker 3: long wheelbase S class Mercedes, and yet on the outside
Speaker 3: it's ten millimeters shorter than a Tesla mode Less. And
Speaker 3: so I bet the house on we're going to engineer
Speaker 3: this car design the whole thing around the will be
Speaker 3: size of these dry units because we will achieve that miniaturization,
Speaker 3: otherwise it wouldn't work, and we managed to pull it off.
Speaker 3: And that's how we were able to do loose it Air.
Speaker 3: It was a huge push that the car would only
Speaker 3: work if we achieved this miniaturization. We had to achieve
Speaker 3: it to make the car work.
Speaker 2: So let's talk a little bit about the Lucid Air,
Speaker 2: which first came out late twenty twenty one.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, twenty one, Yes, five hundred.
Speaker 2: Plus mile range, the longest in the industry, five twenty
Speaker 2: when we launched five twenty, when you lost fastest acceleration,
Speaker 2: highest top speed, lowest drag coefficient, most interior space, most
Speaker 2: luggage space, and then outcomes of the awards fastest changing fast, Well,
Speaker 2: we're going to talk about the new two hundred miles
Speaker 2: and twelve minutes, which nothing compares to that. But I'm
Speaker 2: looking at this run of awards from let's go down
Speaker 2: the Less Car and Driver, Motorsport Edmonds Wards, Automotive Car
Speaker 2: and Driver, World Car Awards, News Week, US News and
Speaker 2: Worlds Report, Bloomberg Car and Driver, motor It's Best Supercar,
Speaker 2: Best Luxury Car, Bust Electric Car ten, Best Engines and
Speaker 2: Propulsion Systems, Top ev Pick record for longest range ever
Speaker 2: tested car, The Year Car, The Year ev Year, the
Speaker 2: Year Like You guys have cleaned up as of April
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four. Like every award, you can suck up
Speaker 2: for this. So the first question is when the Air
Speaker 2: first came out, it was kind of what can we
Speaker 2: do if money is no restraint? But then you've certainly
Speaker 2: come out with subsequent models that are a little more affordable.
Speaker 2: Tell us about the plan for the next few vehicles
Speaker 2: that are coming out of Lucid.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we were really thrilled because we won Motor Trend
Speaker 3: Car the Year for Air and it's the first time
Speaker 3: any company in the history of that award has ever
Speaker 3: won the award with its very first vehicle. No one's
Speaker 3: ever done that before, so this was this was a landmark.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and.
Speaker 3: It was important we started with a high end vehicle
Speaker 3: first to establish the brand. But when I launched Listeday
Speaker 3: in thick of COVID, and we did so on September ninth,
Speaker 3: twenty twenty, I promised the world that we would get
Speaker 3: to an entry level price of sixty nine thousand, nine
Speaker 3: hundred and I'm so pleased that earlier this year I
Speaker 3: met my promise that we brought the pure version of Air,
Speaker 3: which is an outstanding car.
Speaker 2: Sixty's the range of that one.
Speaker 3: Our range of that one is four hundred and nineteen miles.
Speaker 2: Still to share.
Speaker 3: And the reason we're able to do that is that
Speaker 3: we can achieve that with just an eighty eight kilwater
Speaker 3: our battery pack. No one else goes even close to that.
Speaker 2: And that's the efficiency of the mot.
Speaker 3: Yes, which means we can get four nineteen more than
Speaker 3: anyone else has gone with a smaller battery pack. For example,
Speaker 3: Models has got over one hundred kilowattas and because of that,
Speaker 3: because the battery pack costs so much to make, it
Speaker 3: saves us that money, and it's a company we can
Speaker 3: afford to put that product out there.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about a couple more products that are
Speaker 2: on the drawing board. If we look around and we
Speaker 2: see Hyundai and Kiya, they have forty thousand Volkswagen forty
Speaker 2: if something the Model three in the forties before even
Speaker 2: We'll talk about the Chinese evs a little later, But
Speaker 2: it looks like if you can the average price of
Speaker 2: a new car in the US is now about forty
Speaker 2: eight thousand dollars, if you could get in the forties,
Speaker 2: it seems like it opens up a mass market. What
Speaker 2: are the plans. We'll talk about the SUV in a minute.
Speaker 2: What are the plans for, you know, a really affordable
Speaker 2: entry level EV.
Speaker 3: You're describing our mid sized platform exactly that. It's schedule
Speaker 3: for production late twenty six, forty eight to fifty thousand
Speaker 3: dollars car state of the arts, and we'll be able
Speaker 3: to make that because we can go further with less batteries,
Speaker 3: and therefore we can afford to make such a compelling
Speaker 3: car at that price point like no one else can,
Speaker 3: embodying all our learning, all the technology that we've developed
Speaker 3: from air and that will transfer all our knowledge into
Speaker 3: mid sized platform, making evs progressively more affordable. That is
Speaker 3: our mission. We want to be a major player. Don't
Speaker 3: think of listed as a niche luxury player. I want
Speaker 3: to be selling a million of those cars a year
Speaker 3: in the early twenty thirties.
Speaker 2: Give us your spec targets for that mid sized car,
Speaker 2: which I don't think you have a name for yet.
Speaker 2: We haven't what is the horsepower, what is the range,
Speaker 2: and what is the interior space going to be?
Speaker 3: Well, we haven't disclosed that it will just be super competitive,
Speaker 3: but I can say this that I mean that will
Speaker 3: be a time when we overtly compete with Tesla Model
Speaker 3: Y Model three, that will be our Tesla Model three
Speaker 3: And why competitor?
Speaker 2: You want to call that a Model three killer?
Speaker 1: No, I never call an oh.
Speaker 2: All right again, I'm putting words into your mouth. So
Speaker 2: what I would imagine room for both, What I would
Speaker 2: imagine would do really well in the market. Is a
Speaker 2: car that costs forty somethings one thousand dollars is the
Speaker 2: size of an E class Mercedes or smaller with a
Speaker 2: range four hundred Dare I say five hundred miles and
Speaker 2: four hundred to five hundred horsepower? Am I hallucinating or
Speaker 2: is that? Are those realistic?
Speaker 3: I think we have to look at the need for
Speaker 3: range in the future. Paradoxically, I see the electric curls
Speaker 3: of the future having less range than today and less.
Speaker 2: Need for it as a network gets built out, as.
Speaker 3: You get a more mature charging infrastruture. I never get
Speaker 3: range anxiety in a gasoline car.
Speaker 2: I might always a guest, I might.
Speaker 3: Have a strange accent, but I have learned something during
Speaker 3: my days in the US. There's a gas stration on
Speaker 3: every street corner.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to run out.
Speaker 3: Unless I'm in Utah, and there's a next the next
Speaker 3: I don't have to worry about getting gas.
Speaker 1: So while we.
Speaker 3: See when we see a more mature charging infrastructure, and
Speaker 3: the other thing that's coming is fast charging cell chemistry.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about that. So that's going to help
Speaker 2: the new technology that Gen one, not Gen two or three,
Speaker 2: but the next EV charging system that you're going to
Speaker 2: have available is two hundred miles of charge in twelve minutes. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we've got that that exists today. Yeah, so that's a
Speaker 2: that's a pretty big lift for you know, for a
Speaker 2: cup of coffee and a bathroom streak, you have two
Speaker 2: hundred miles. What's the next generation after that?
Speaker 3: Well, first of all, and what I want to say
Speaker 3: is the way I will answer you a question, but
Speaker 3: this is a very important point. The way charging is
Speaker 3: measured really frustrates me because everyone is obsessed with measuring
Speaker 3: it and how fast the percentage of the battery charges
Speaker 3: ten to eighty percent. What doesn't matter totally. It doesn't
Speaker 3: matter what percentage the battery charges. If your range sucks,
Speaker 3: your charge rate will suck. So what's important is the
Speaker 3: power that's going in and killer what's multiplied by your
Speaker 3: efficiency in miles per killer what are and that will
Speaker 3: give you miles charged, Well, it will give you technically
Speaker 3: per hour, but it's miles per minute that matters. And
Speaker 3: we're on the same page. That is the first thing.
Speaker 3: That's the thing that counts. And we're able to get
Speaker 3: a granturing and get three hundred miles range charge in
Speaker 3: twenty one minutes. It's extraordinary, not We've got the fastest
Speaker 3: charging thing on the planet. Now, one of the issues
Speaker 3: with today's cells is that you trade you trade energy
Speaker 3: for power. So actually you could you could have faster
Speaker 3: charging power dense cells, but you'd lose range for that.
Speaker 3: So we always cold tend to go for more energy
Speaker 3: cells which have got a limit to the change rate.
Speaker 2: So that I do both. Can you have a small
Speaker 2: number of fast charging cells.
Speaker 3: That sort of the benefits cancel each other out. It's
Speaker 3: it's a it's a great idea, but it's you do
Speaker 3: the math and it doesn't help you. Actually, it actually
Speaker 3: makes things even more complex. One of the potential saviors
Speaker 3: here is the the growth of LFP. This is the
Speaker 3: new lithium.
Speaker 1: The iron phosphate chemistry.
Speaker 3: Now, iron phosphate has kind of sucked because it's lower
Speaker 3: energy and it's cheaper, so it's kind of like the
Speaker 3: cheaper nasty Poorman's cell.
Speaker 1: And it's been really.
Speaker 3: Developed a lot, particularly by the Chinese, and actually it's
Speaker 3: it's its energy capacity is growing quite healthily of late,
Speaker 3: and it's got the added an'tig it can take a
Speaker 3: lot of power charging. So I think there's a real
Speaker 3: argument for less lower range cars with lfpece cells and
Speaker 3: more mature infrastructure not to go so far extenseve. Yes,
Speaker 3: you take a mass hit, but with lucid efficiency, then
Speaker 3: with the mass hit becomes less because we're carrying less
Speaker 3: less solace. And then okay, you have to charge a
Speaker 3: bit more often, but it's really fast when you do change.
Speaker 3: So you're thinking then about like stopping for seven or
Speaker 3: eight minutes rather than fifteen minutes, and and so it's
Speaker 3: going to be more stop and go.
Speaker 2: And that's what buyd and the Chinese Manufac.
Speaker 3: There byd Goshen. There's there's several they're really taking a
Speaker 3: lead in this blade type LFP technology, and I think
Speaker 3: it has its place. I think for a performance premium car,
Speaker 3: cylindrical lithium ions mcs are the right solutions still and
Speaker 3: I think they will have their place alongside LFP.
Speaker 2: So it sounds like you're fairly impressed with the technology
Speaker 2: in the EV space coming out of China. I believe
Speaker 2: was it last year BYD passed Tesla for the highest
Speaker 2: selling EV manufacturer.
Speaker 1: I believe you're right.
Speaker 2: So China is going to be a force out there.
Speaker 2: We're not currently allowing those cars into the United States.
Speaker 2: I don't know if that changes anytime soon. What do
Speaker 2: you think of the technology that you know that not
Speaker 2: just the battery technology but the whole automobile. Is China
Speaker 2: going to be a major player in the EV space?
Speaker 3: Bigknie tariffs announced in Europe as well. So my take
Speaker 3: on China is this that their vehicle engineering has advanced
Speaker 3: to a shocking degree in a good way in the
Speaker 3: last three years. I can't believe how much better their
Speaker 3: cards are. Battery technology for LFP, they're in a leadership position.
Speaker 3: The powertrain technology is still several years behind Tesla, and
Speaker 3: Tesla's several years behind us, but don't underestimate them. I mean,
Speaker 3: if they can transform their vehicle, I want to talk
Speaker 3: about vehicle engineering, I mean fit and finish door slam
Speaker 3: with noise, ceiling materials, comfort.
Speaker 1: In Let me interrupt you, traditional attribute, Let.
Speaker 2: Me interrupt you. The thing that I have been so
Speaker 2: impressed with the Lucids i've seen is you not only
Speaker 2: come from an automotive background, whereas Tesla is a little
Speaker 2: more of a technology but it feels like a luxury car.
Speaker 2: The fit and finish is outstanding, the materials is excellent. Like,
Speaker 2: it's obvious you want to compete with Mercedes Tesla. But
Speaker 2: the thing I have to ask about is the US
Speaker 2: has shifted to a giant suv market. Tell us about gravity.
Speaker 2: When are we going to see the first suv with
Speaker 2: a four hundred or five hundred mile range from Lucid.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And first of all, with the luxury, we wanted to
Speaker 3: endow the car with a quiet luxury and understated luxury,
Speaker 3: but really high quality materials in a very understated sort
Speaker 3: of a California inspired design sensibility, and that's often misinterpreted
Speaker 3: and it's not true luxury. Well it's not ostentatious luxury. Now,
Speaker 3: it's understated, quiet luxury. So moving on to gravity. You ask,
Speaker 3: so Gravity is scheduled for starter production late this year.
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 1: Really, yes, absolutely.
Speaker 3: It's going to be a seminal product. It's going to
Speaker 3: be the best suv on the planet. Nothing less will suffice.
Speaker 2: Well, when will consumers first be able to purchase these.
Speaker 3: We haven't announced precise purchase start of purchase which scheduled
Speaker 3: for starter production late this year. Realistically, the ramp up
Speaker 3: in production will take place during the early part of
Speaker 3: next year, so watch this space for an announcement in
Speaker 3: terms of availability.
Speaker 2: And are we aiming about a comparable price to the.
Speaker 3: Air Yeah, I see a starting point of just under
Speaker 3: eighty thousand dollars for a variant of gravity.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, that's essential.
Speaker 2: And I know I only have you for about five minutes.
Speaker 2: I have to ask one question that we didn't get to.
Speaker 2: You're the CEO of a public company. I know that
Speaker 2: comes with all sorts of obligations and dare I say headaches?
Speaker 2: How do you feel about being public? How is your
Speaker 2: capital setup? Are you comfortable that you could go the
Speaker 2: distance to the twenty thirties? What are your thoughts about
Speaker 2: being a public company and having access to the capital markets.
Speaker 3: Well, I take more responsibilities very seriously. It is a
Speaker 3: way to my shoulders, but it's one that I can carry.
Speaker 3: I'm comfortable with what we're doing. I think we we
Speaker 3: can conduct ourselves in an incredibly ethical manner. I'm very
Speaker 3: committed to this company, and I'm all in. I've never
Speaker 3: sold a single share in the company ever.
Speaker 2: And I've had a giant run up when it came yes.
Speaker 3: Actually, and actually that that triggered some of my performance
Speaker 3: stock options, which are based my stock options performance package
Speaker 3: was based entirely upon share price, and so all that
Speaker 3: remuneration was due to performance related stock options, which I triggered.
Speaker 3: I've not I've not sold a single share other than
Speaker 3: the ones that I just had to for tax purposes.
Speaker 1: And so I'm all in.
Speaker 3: On this company. I am resolutely optimistic. I think we've
Speaker 3: got the best car in the world at the moment.
Speaker 1: In the Lucid Air.
Speaker 3: We're out selling Porsche, Tychan and Mercedes. Here in the US,
Speaker 3: we're out selling bw I seven, We're out selling the
Speaker 3: Etron e GT. And this this is a company that
Speaker 3: many people still haven't even heard of.
Speaker 2: Lisid any plans for a two door coop a sports car.
Speaker 3: I'd love to do it, but we've got laser commitment.
Speaker 3: We have to focus on the big ones. Gravity, So
Speaker 3: we got air now Gravity is coming, and then the
Speaker 3: really big one, the mid size platform, the more affordable
Speaker 3: forty eight fifty thousand dollars car. We've got a laser
Speaker 3: focus upon that and something else, a technology roadmap, which
Speaker 3: excites me the most because no one else is staying still.
Speaker 3: This is a technological race, and we have to keep
Speaker 3: running because if you don't run, others will catch you up.
Speaker 3: And the best defense we have is to keep our
Speaker 3: tech roadmap intact. And that's what excites me the most.
Speaker 2: So last question before I let you get on with
Speaker 2: the rest of your New York tour, take me to
Speaker 2: the early twenty thirties. Where do you want to be
Speaker 2: in units you're selling? How many different models do you
Speaker 2: want to sell? What does Lucid look like seven years
Speaker 2: from now in twenty thirty one.
Speaker 3: I believe we can be a healthy company. I think
Speaker 3: that what is not recognized is that our technological advantage today,
Speaker 3: which is seen as a burden, it will become a
Speaker 3: cost down enabler and therefore we will operate be able
Speaker 3: to operate at a better gross margin. Because of that,
Speaker 3: our very technology will be a gross margin enhancer, which
Speaker 3: will give us a profitability edge. And by the early
Speaker 3: twenty thirties. I'd like us to be seen selling no
Speaker 3: less than a million cars a year, because that's what
Speaker 3: it takes to have a meaningful impact upon the environment.
Speaker 3: But I also want this multiplier effect with our tech
Speaker 3: licensing business because what the world needs is the twenty
Speaker 3: five to thirty thousand dollars corp. And I don't think
Speaker 3: that's the business we Lucid as a company and our
Speaker 3: shareholders deserve, because it's all about volume, low margins. But
Speaker 3: I think others could manufacture that having access to our
Speaker 3: will leading technology, and with that multiplier effect, we truly
Speaker 3: can have an impact upon the environment and therefore the
Speaker 3: future mankind.
Speaker 2: Fascinating stuff. Thanks Peter for being so generous with your time.
Speaker 2: We have been speaking with Peter Rawlinson, Lucid CEO and CTO.
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