Outgoing Lucid boss explains why “most EVs suck”

Oh to be an electric car maker. “If you want to be loved and have rocks thrown at you simultaneously, you’ve got it. There’s virtually nobody without an opinion. We’re not lacking love or hate. Anyone would think what I’m trying to do is genocidal.”

In fact, all that Lucid Motors’ Peter Rawlinson has been trying to do is make the most efficient cars in the world, which if executed correctly could make them the best.

While Lucid makes electric cars and is therefore called an electric car maker alongside any number of wannabe Tesla rivals, spend any length of time with Rawlinson – formerly of Tesla himself – and you realise that Lucid is very different to any other company out there.

We spoke to him when he was in his long-held position as CEO, but this week it was announced he had resigned to take a new strategic advisory technical role on the board. Regardless of how the company might change day to day under a new CEO, though, Lucid isn’t about to change course on its technology or how it makes cars. 

While Lucid’s peers are mainly using the switch to EVs as a way to ultimately reduce emissions, it sees EVs as the opportunity for a better car, period. Rawlinson highlights just how misguided so much EV development has been and reframes just how EVs should be viewed, starting with the most important part of all: efficiency.

“You can achieve range effectively in two ways,” he says. “One is battery size and one is efficiency.” Rawlinson can’t fathom why efficiency is so fundamentally misunderstood and underestimated in the EV lexicon. “Not only by making a car more efficient is it using less of the world’s energy, it’s also using less battery resources and minerals,” he says. 

As the battery is the biggest cost item of an EV, this will lead to lower EV prices in the future, too. “It’s only really Lucid that’s taking this pioneering approach,” claims Rawlinson. 

“The Lucid Air Pure [saloon] is literally the world’s most energy-efficient car. It uses less fuel to go from A to B, whatever your fuel is, than any mass-production car ever in the 130-year history of the car. No one else is even close to this in terms of how advanced their technology is.”

The technology that Rawlinson refers to in getting this remarkable efficiency – which has been independently validated by US legislators – is a proprietary design that contains the electric motor and inverter in the same downsized unit.

Yet the dominant language concerning EVs is range, and the enabling factor in the market generally to that end has been battery size. This irks Rawlinson, as he believes that ignoring efficiency is “missing the point” and “insane”.

“Because we’re so efficient, we’ve got a much bigger range,” he says. “We can do 500 miles of range without having a crazy-large battery pack. And because that battery pack isn’t crazy-large, the car is agile and handles well and rides well and is comfortable and roomy for your feet.

“What efficiency fundamentally gives you is a massively better car. The problem we’ve got is that if you look at the petrol equivalent, the only thing that efficiency gives you is less cost of buying petrol. It doesn’t really make a better car, it just means you pay less for petrol. 

“That’s the difference between an electric car and a petrol car: you get a car that does 20mpg versus 40mpg, but the 40mpg car is worse, because it’s not got the performance.

“Most car enthusiasts with petrol cars will want an inefficient car because it’s higher performance. The reason the [range-topping Air] Sapphire can blow everyone out the water is because of its efficiency. It doesn’t lose power and it turns all those electrons to burn rubber. Efficiency gives it performance. 

“And that’s the difference with a petrol car, where efficiency means low performance. With electric cars, because it’s the other way around, the more efficient they are, you can have higher performance, because you’re not losing power to heat in turning the power into burning rubber. So everything everyone has learned about cars is wrong.” 

To put it another way, Rawlinson says that if he told you “I’ve just got a car to do 100mpg, you’d say it was a Bluemotion [Volkswagen] Golf. But no, I’ve done it in a [Mercedes-Benz] S-Class. You’d say that was bullshit, but that’s literally what we have here [with the Air]. We have an S-Class long-wheelbase in terms of interior room which is doing 146mpg.” (That figure is actually MPGe, an official US figure that enables consumers to directly compare EV efficiency with ICE car efficiency.)

“Nobody is writing about it, because it’s so far out and feels unbelievable. People said I was lying three years ago when I said we would have 500 miles of range. When it became true, they said I’d stuffed the car full of batteries. 

“The problem is, it’s so much better than the competition that people don’t grasp it. These aren’t numbers I’m claiming, these are government numbers, independently validated and underwritten.”

On an environmental level, Rawlinson says, “if you’ve got twice the efficiency, you’re going to have half the battery. That means less mines for lithium, less cobalt mining, less nickel”. 

While Lucid produces its own motors, it sources batteries from partner firms including LG Chem, Panasonic and Samsung. It chooses to invest and develop in motor technology because it believes this is where true gains can be made in efficiency, and it has ongoing research projects to boost that efficiency even further.

Rawlinson explains: “Everyone talks about battery efficiency, but battery efficiency almost doesn’t exist. It’s a misnomer. It’s crazy. It’s a bit like saying ‘petrol efficiency’. ‘Is it Shell’s [petrol that’s more efficient] or Aramco’s?’ That would be ridiculous, but that’s what we’re talking about.

With batteries, it would be good for everyone to stop using the wrong words to describe things.”

Solid-state technology has long been widely viewed as the future of EVs for allowing smaller, more power-dense, faster-charging batteries, but Rawlinson is “bearish” on his view that this won’t be the case, as “nobody can solve the productionisation” of solid-state batteries yet; they haven’t made in anything more than laboratory quantities. 

He has an open offer to supply any solid-state battery supplier with a Lucid battery pack that they can use to demonstrate their technology. The results would be shared but Lucid wouldn’t look inside the pack, to protect the supplier’s intellectual property. 

“But in eight years, nobody has taken me up on that offer,” says Rawlinson. “You can’t build them [at scale]. It would take three years to fill that pack.

“I’m not saying it won’t happen. It might happen. If it does happen, hallelujah. Combine that with our efficiency and you’re then suddenly able to halve the battery weight. But our efficiency still counts. Solid-state [technology] promises to deliver but never ever does, because no one can put it into mass production.”

He’s more optimistic about the lithium-ion-phosphate (LFP) battery chemistry that’s emerging in lower-cost EVs as an alternative to nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC).

“They were heavy and didn’t store much energy, so they were low-cost but low-range,” says Rawlinson, but improvements to energy density and their ability to withstand fast-charging have made him “much more bullish” about their adoption. 

More generally, Rawlinson isn’t surprised that EV sales are stalling “because so many of them suck. I’m sorry, this is the truth,” he says, elaborating that many have “very poor range” and are made from “low technology, off-the-shelf commodity parts”. 

Then there’s the problem of “the accessibility, the usability and the reliability of the [public] charging infrastructure” if you don’t have access to the Air’s whopping range – something still denied to Rawlinson’s fellow Brits (see right).

“If you’ve got an incredible charging infrastructure, you don’t need so much range; if you haven’t, you need range,” he says. “Right now, we haven’t got reliable infrastructure and we haven’t got sufficient cars with much range. And so it’s a horrible experience.”

This links into what Rawlinson believes is “a myopia about fast charging”. He is an advocate for confronting what he sees as the bigger issue of on-street charging, which allows EVs to be charged overnight by people who don’t have a driveway or garage at home.

“I think this is very important,” Rawlinson says, “because if you look at the amount of electricity it takes to mobilise cars, I don’t think that’s an issue. The average person may travel about 20-30 miles a day, because not everybody is doing long commutes. 

“Lucid can do five miles per kilowatt hour now [on the US test, which is more stringent than the WLTP test used in Europe and the UK]. To get that 20 miles [range], it requires only 4kWh in a 24-hour cycle.

“Don’t tell me there isn’t enough electricity on the grid. That isn’t the issue. I think people shouldn’t have to be thinking in terms of going to fast charge.

“They should be charging overnight when the electricity is cheaper, when the grid is down, when the electricity is available. It’s better for the power stations, because they’re not coking up and coking down in a 24-hour cycle. I’m a big advocate of working on the infrastructure of overnight, slower, AC charging at home or on the street.”

This brings us to the issue of EVs’ affordability. “I’m not surprised [that they’re expensive],” says Rawlinson. “It’s because car makers are going down the range route as a function of battery size. Lucid never did this. Range is a function of our efficiency, through technology.

“If you go down the route of range as a function of battery size, the only way you will achieve range is putting more batteries in, and that will cost so much more.

“How can you make that vehicle affordably? You can’t, because you’ve got to stuff all those expensive batteries in. And this is the problem. This is the whole wrong mindset. Our technology enables cars to have the range without the cost of those batteries.

“And this is going to play out over the next few years. People aren’t seeing it today, because we’ve got high-end cars which compete with Mercedes and Porsche. It will play out when we have more affordable cars.”