Lucid Motors Is the Latest Silicon Valley EV Upstart

Chances are you’ve never heard of Lucid Motors. The company has been around for nearly a decade but only recently rebranded itself from Atieva in mid-October. Despite (or perhaps because of) its lack of public awareness, several members of the Lucid team came to Los Angeles for some private briefings during AutoMobility LA. I had an opportunity to learn about what Lucid is planning, get a VR walk-around of the company’s finished vehicle design, and check out one of its prototypes.

The Lucid team includes former Tesla staff among its ranks, including CTO Peter Rawlinson and marketing director Zak Edson. The company’s as-yet-unnamed luxury sedan is scheduled to go into production in 2018 and will be built at a US factory, although no site has yet been announced. Atieva was launched in late 2007, focusing on producing batteries for commercial EVs. “Atieva-powered vehicles have accumulated more than 20 million miles of real-world use with a faultless safety record,” said Rawlinson.

Smaller Footprint, Larger Interior

Rawlinson joined Atieva in 2014 when the company decided to build cars from the ground up. Despite the achievements of Tesla, Rawlinson explained that he still saw a lot of untapped potential in repackaging everything to take advantage of the electric drive system. Tesla’s Model S has the footprint of a large luxury car, but only has the passenger volume of a midsize sedan at 94 cubic feet. However, it meets the US Environmental Protection Agency’s large car designation based on its 26 cubic feet of cargo space, bringing the total to the 120 cubic feet threshold to qualify as “large.”

Rawlinson and Derek Jenkins, Lucid’s vice president of design, sought to reverse that trend with a smaller footprint (akin to a midsize Mercedes-Benz E-class) and an interior volume of 112 cubic feet for occupants. The Lucid sedan uses a similar skateboard layout to other modern dedicated battery EVs (BEVs), with the battery pack under the floor and electric motors at each axle.

In mid-2016, Lucid published a video showing off the performance capabilities of an in-development powertrain prototype based on a Mercedes-Benz Metris cargo van. Using a 600 horsepower (hp) front motor and 400 hp rear motor, the van is capable of sub-3 second 0-60 mph acceleration.

Better Batteries

Lucid has been developing its own proprietary battery chemistry that Rawlinson claims will have 20% greater volumetric energy density and will be less vulnerable to deterioration from repeated fast charges. Assuming Lucid and its cell manufacturing partners can deliver, this will help enable the company to deliver a 100 kWh battery with an optional 130 kWh unit to deliver driving ranges of 300 and 400 miles, respectively. The company plans to equip its car with a sensor package capable of Level 4 autonomous driving. The package includes four solid-state lidar sensors, short- and long-range radar and cameras, and ultrasonic sensors.

The prototype that Lucid brought to Los Angeles had an incomplete interior, but based on the VR demo and looking at the test vehicle, it does appear to be more roomy than Tesla’s Model S. Pricing won’t be announced for some time but it will likely be comparable to the Tesla and in line with Lucid’s goal of delivering a zero-emissions executive jet for the road. Lucid plans to publicly reveal its car on December 14 at its engineering facility in Fremont, California.