If things go right for Lucid Motors, this lesser-known California automaker could be poised to challenge Tesla‘s prominence as Silicon Valley’s preferred EV producer. It’s looking very much like a Ford-versus-Chevrolet–style crosstown rivalry in the making. Lucid, formerly known as Atieva, is in Menlo Park, next door to Palo Alto where Tesla is headquartered, and Lucid’s chief technology officer—the one spearheading development of the new brand’s electric luxury sedan—is Peter Rawlinson, the former chief engineer of the Tesla Model S.
Rawlinson, a veteran of Lotus and Jaguar, has brought along many from the original Model S team and added fresh faces to address the rapid confluence of technology and mobility. But he swears that Lucid isn’t doing a remake of the Model S. All that experience on the team boosts the chances of seeing a good—perhaps great—car through to production.
Rawlinson conceived Lucid’s sedan as one that at last embraces the spatial and packaging freedom afforded by an all-electric powertrain. He says the Model S too closely followed traditional long-hood, cabin-back sports-sedan proportions, so Rawlinson sought out former Mazda North America director of design Derek Jenkins to establish a concept that breaks free of those constraints.
Getting Rid of the Combustion Cues
Jenkins, who helped pen the current Mazda MX-5 Miata and contributed to the design of most current Mazdas—including the new CX-9—mused that EV powertrain technology has miniaturized to the point that Lucid’s 600-hp rear motor and transmission would fit into the space commercial airlines allow for a carry-on bag. Jenkins posited: “How can that not profoundly change the design of the automobile? That’s what nobody else has done to this point.
“The idea that I’m going to package this 100-year-old vertical radiator at the front of the car to tell people I have to work really hard to be high performance, this notion of the automobile, it will change, particularly from electrification,” Jenkins said. Likewise, Jenkins called the use of a long hood to establish performance credentials “legacy thinking.”
Jenkins’s design marries the cabin length and interior volume of a large luxury sedan—think of the long-wheelbase Mercedes-Benz S-class—within the overall length and width of a mid-sizer like the E-class. At a recent private, no-cameras preview, C/D was shown one of the company’s “alpha prototypes.” Although we can’t show it to you in full, we can say that the design does indeed plow some new ground, bringing a fresh sense of beauty and contouring to a design that’s essentially cab forward and delivering on its claims of phenomenal space and legroom, front and rear. “We’re looking at a much larger piece of the pie [compared with the Model S], looking for a car that parks easily but allows the space of those long-wheelbase cars,” said Jenkins. “The electrification is enabling this combination of use attributes that nobody else is taking on. We see it not just as key to Lucid’s first product, but for future products as well.”
Years of EV Powertrain Development
To rewind a bit: Atieva had been around since 2007, but until the past 18 months or so, it was focused almost entirely on the development of battery power-pack technology. Much of that expertise is being applied both to its new sedan, and to racing, as it will be the sole battery-pack supplier for Formula E, in its fifth and sixth seasons.
It has been working on its dual-motor all-wheel-drive system long enough to already be on the third generation of its inverter design—the electronic element that converts the battery pack’s DC power to three-phase AC for the propulsion motors. It’s testing its drivetrain and batteries in Edna, a test mule built up from a Euro-spec Mercedes-Benz Metris van. The battery packs, inverters, motor systems, and body structure have all been developed entirely in-house, while other aspects of the sedan have meant forging new supplier relationships.
The design and engineering of the body in white—the chassis structure without the powertrain, suspension, doors, or fenders—was locked in a few weeks ago. It’s made mostly of aluminum with some limited use of high-strength steel. Rawlinson said the stiffness is “way beyond what we did before” [with the Model S], and it weighs less. He teased the sedan’s “beguiling dynamics,” noting that the suspension development is under the direction of an engineer who worked on Subaru’s World Rally Championship winners.
Straight-line performance could challenge that of the Tesla Model S P100D. The test mule Edna is about 1000 pounds heavier than the actual production car, but Lucid claims to have pushed its drivetrain’s output as high as 1200 horsepower to achieve zero-to-60-mph times under the 2.7-second mark. It further says that 2.9-second times are reproducible as long as the battery’s charged; the biggest obstacle has been broken half-shafts and CV joints carried over with Edna’s Mercedes chassis.
Rapid Progress for Fast Charging
Lucid claims its battery chemistry will be the “secret sauce” that enables efficient packaging, stable temperatures, and consistent performance. It plans to build its own battery packs with small-format cylindrical cells from a supplier (either the 18650-format size that Tesla uses or the somewhat larger 21700 size), using proprietary cell chemistry. Mission: the ability to fast-charge daily and maintain 80 percent of the original capacity after 1000 full-charge cycles.
“That was something I would have thought was impossible last year, but we’re making very rapid progress,” said Lucid’s director of battery technology, Albert Liu. “We really emphasized that and pushed our suppliers to come up with a custom chemistry that is very suitable for repeated fast charging.”
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“The advent of the Uber and Lyft model is going to demand an electric car which can be rapidly charged and is tolerant of rapid, repeated [fast charging].”
— Peter Rawlinson, Lucid Motors
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While developers at other automakers typically have one team working on power electronics and another on thermal effects, Rawlinson said, Lucid has them working together to develop an integrated system. “It’s called multi-physics. It’s world leading,” he claimed, adding, “and this means a more compact pack with extraordinary energy density and a shape that’s configured around the demands of the occupant space of the vehicle.” Rawlinson pointed back to the Model S and said that driving range was the Holy Grail. But now, he says, the new Holy Grail for EVs is duty cycle.
“The best analogy I can make is in the aircraft industry—how many hours of the day is that plane in the air? How quickly can you turn that plane around? The advent of the Uber and Lyft model is going to demand an electric car which can be rapidly charged and is tolerant of rapid, repeated Supercharging [fast charging],” Rawlinson said.
In standard form, Rawlinson promised, the car will have an EPA-rated driving range of more than 300 miles per full charge—and he hinted that a special model may reach 400 miles.
F1-influenced Aero and New Lighting Ideas
The shape of the sedan was finessed by an expert hired from the Red Bull Formula 1 racing team; it employs a new vortex induction system. Air enters through a very small opening and swirls into a vortex. This throws the air from the vortex into a more even distribution onto the radiators for better cooling with less drag.
Lucid is pushing for advanced headlights that fit into small (1.2 by 0.4 inch) modules. They’d make 12,000 microbeams in each array, with each beam computer controlled among thousands of focal lengths to create a three-dimensional light field. These would comply with regulations while delivering 50 percent more visible light.
Ready for Voice Commands, Autonomous Operation, and Sharing
The Lucid sedan will come with a natural-language voice system developed in-house, led by user-experience chief Jared Strawderman, who previously managed the team that developed the voice experience for Amazon’s Alexa. The system will employ highly customizable displays combined with machine-learning strategies to identify tasks you’d routinely do and then make suggestions—for example, giving traffic advice if it knows that you typically leave work earlier on a particular day.
Active noise cancellation will use 10 speakers (the top sound system has 29) to quell background sounds, while four beam-formed microphones aimed at different occupant zones will ensure that the voice-recognition system hears clearly. Strawderman promises that this system will be better than any in-vehicle voice interface now on the market—and will be reliable for autonomous driving and car sharing among various users.
The vehicle will also be capable of autonomous driving from launch, with all cars getting an array that combines ultrasonic sensors, short- and long-range radar sensors, surround radar, short- and long-range camera sensing, and lidar. It’s designed, Lucid claims, for Level 4 autonomous-driving capability.
U.S. First, But Ready for China
The company insists that at this time it intends to build its sedan only in the United States, although it has been considering joint ventures in China for cars to be sold in that market. China is the next market to be targeted after an initial sales launch in the United States toward the end of 2018; after that, Lucid is looking at Europe.
Manufacturing director Brian Barron vouched for the plan’s viability. He was lured away from BMW’s South Carolina facility, where he oversaw the establishment of a new production line for the X3 and X4. Barron said the company will move on with breaking ground for its proposed (and secret) U.S. factory location very quickly. He noted that production of 20,000 sedans annually in the first couple of years will take up more space than it should—about 2 million square feet. At the slow startup pace, there’d be a lot of manual assembly, but space is being allotted with an eye toward automated production and a target volume of 130,000 vehicles after five years.
The Menlo Park, California, firm has funding from Venrock, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking, LeEco, and Tsing Capital. LeEco plans to sell cars in the future but so far has a stronger bond with California EV upstart Faraday Future. Rawlinson points out that there’s no such majority stake for Lucid.
Manufacturing Base and Dealerships? All Still TBA
Although the company claims to be on stable enough financial footing to develop the sedan and see it through to production, pressing the executives about two matters revealed that the company is seeking more funding for key steps. One is retail: Lucid plans to skip the franchise model in favor of the direct-sales model used at Tesla, which is still sinking legal expenses into a state-by-state battle. Lucid may be able to avoid some mistakes Tesla made while benefiting from resolution of ongoing court cases. The other hurdle is making sure customers can charge their cars easily. Lucid is part of the Charging Interface Initiative (CharIN) organization, based in Germany and including BMW, Daimler, Opel, Porsche, and Volkswagen, among others, that is aiming for standardization of CCS/Combo fast charging. Rawlinson said the Lucid car can charge at 400 volts and will be ready for the upgrades afforded by higher-tier fast charging.
Left unanswered during our visit was the question of why the company is hesitating to announce the location of its proposed manufacturing plant. Time is tight if it is to make deliveries in the late-2018 timeframe. Tesla managed to make its first Model S deliveries almost exactly two years after announcing the Fremont, California, plant decision.
Is this all so much smoke and mirrors? Almost certainly not. The crew at Lucid has a unified vision for what amounts to a well-thought-out performance luxury sedan. Furthermore, it’s a team that appears to be taking the high road, with proper engineering and research to back it all up in-house. Building cars as an independent isn’t for the faint of heart, however, and automotive history shows a trail of casualties. This team of experts looks to have the chops to pull it off, but then, that’s exactly what many were saying about Fisker in the early days.
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