"Future Mass-Market EVs Only Need 250 Miles Of Range: Lucid CEO" - Articles

[Deleted member 4581]

"The biggest impact on the mass market car will be with smaller battery packs. My vision is could we get to six miles per kilowatt-hour? We're at 4.6 now. Could we get to six miles per kilowatt-hour with a fast-charging infrastructure, with overnight charging? The electric car of the future only needs 250 miles. We don't need 500-mile cars in the future, 10 years from now."
https://insideevs.com/news/675113/future-mass-market-evs-need-250-miles-range-lucid-ceo/

Lucid plans Tesla Model 3 and Model Y rivals next: exclusive CEO interview

 

[WasserGKuehlt]

I really liked Lucid and rooted for them to topple Tesla. (You can see where this is going.) That was 3-4 years ago, when their technology was the best in the world, Tesla was in “production hell” and there were no other serious competitors on the horizon.

But this guy has gotten stuck in the past, while the world moved on. Turns out consumers don’t give two whits about technology, they prefer to buy products which are available and meet their needs. Meanwhile, they’re still struggling to make 10 cars per week (Tesla sold 20k Model S and X in the last quarter, at a similar price point, so 1600/week), they’re ecstatic over an alliance with Aston Martin (another struggling maker - with MB technology they sell less than half what Ferrari does at a higher price point), and now he’s being aspirational about “intel inside” - another brand well past its most glamorous days.

“Real artists ship”, dude, and the world won’t flock to your door to buy the “best technology” if you can’t make more than one unit per day (of whatever it is). I’m pretty sure others can figure out how to make a tight winding, or pack a battery.

He’s not wrong about the price point of an affordable EV - 4k/battery sounds to me like the cost of a mass-produced engine (~2k) + transmission and a bit of profit padding. I do think he’s dead wrong about an acceptable range of 150mi - the vast majority of potential EV customers may not need that, but won’t be making the jump on less than 300. It hasn’t got to do with reason, and they don’t like to be told “you’ll be fine”.