American EV maker Lucid Motors in July this year has stated its aim of producing rivals to the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y, including right-hand-drive versions of those models, and now its CEO Peter Rawlinson has told Autocar that the company’s upcoming will be priced from around US$50,000 (RM231,650) to drastically increase its sales volumes.
“We have to go with volume, because that’s what we’re about,” the CEO told Autocar, saying that the upscale Air and Gravity EVs were launched first due to the costs involved in setting up a new car company.
Details of the upcoming, higher-volume models remain yet to be confirmed, however Rawlinson suggested that their arrival to market would be sooner than expected. Being high-volume models meant to rival the aforementioned Teslas, the Model 3 and Model Y, these mid-sized models are to be smaller than the Air sedan and Gravity SUV.
“I’ve formally stated mid- to late-decade, and that has been completely misquoted as the end of the decade, [as in] 2030. What I mean is ‘not 2025’. It’s a few years away, but it’s close. It takes three and a half years to do a car, and we’ve started; and that wasn’t yesterday,” he said.
The brand’s upcoming mid-sized model line “is going to be overtly a Tesla competitor” in the high-volume family car market against the Model 3 and Model Y, Rawlinson said.
Lucid can 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,” and by making a car able to achieve a target battery range with less battery capacity, that car can be made cheaper, he said.
Responding to a question if Lucid would build cars with the megacasting method as used by Tesla, which minimises the number of individual components in a car to reduce cost and production times, Rawlinson said he “would do anything that I see as technically beneficial.”
Production of right-hand-drive versions – which opens the door to entering markets such as Malaysia – is likely to be in 2025, which is the brand’s target date for entering the United Kingdom market.
“We’ve got to do [the Air in right-hand-drive]. To do that is probably going to take us 18 months and we’re absolutely slammed, because I’ve got all my main engineering team doing all the design and development for Gravity. So, realistically, it’s two years away,” Rawlinson said of the companies RHD product plans.
GALLERY: Lucid Gravity
GALLERY: Lucid Air Sapphire
GALLERY: 2021 Lucid Air
Looking to sell your car? Sell it with myTukar.
