Lucid Motors to compete with Tesla

A new luxury electric vehicle company, Lucid Motors, is making its way to the market. Lucid’s goal is to be the new face of luxury electric vehicles and plans to compete with Tesla Motors for that spot.

Lucid believes the electrification of cars to be the ultimate driving experience. “The entire vehicle, including our proprietary powertrain system, has been finessed to deliver world-class performance in acceleration, driving range, and efficiency,” the Lucid website states.

Production for the new Lucid cars will begin in late 2018 and early 2019. Production will take place in Casa Grande, Arizona and will be available to people all over the nation.

Ex-Tesla chief engineer and creator of Lucid,  Peter Rawlinson, started the company in Silicon Valley. The base model of Lucid cars will offer 200 miles of battery life, rear wheel drive and 400 horsepower through a single electric motor. Tesla’s base model S 60 is rated at 210 miles of range, rear wheel drive and 320 horsepower.

Both Lucid and Tesla utilize advanced technology, yet the Lucid Air vehicle has three touch screens within the driver’s line of sight. These touchscreens do things from controlling media to controlling the car’s temperature. The touchscreen on the Tesla vehicles include a 17-inch center touchscreen that controls those same capabilities. Both the Tesla Model S and the Lucid Air have hardware that allows for fully autonomous driving.

Lucid and Tesla will be comparable in price. The Lucid base model will start at $52,500, while Tesla’s base Model S 60, before optional upgrades, will be priced at $53,700.

“When you see anyone driving a Tesla, you just know they’re making money. They’re expensive cars,” said UW Tacoma student Allie Kruse.

Unless they make electric cars more affordable, Kruse believes there’s no way for them to be popular in the marketplace of Tacoma. As for UW Tacoma student John Strassburg, he has an opposing viewpoint.

“Electric cars are definitely popular, it just depends on the demographic,” he said. They seem more popular among city folk.”

CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk more than welcomes competition with his company.

Tesla is driven by strong ideology to transition the world to sustainable transport. “We’re very philosophically motivated. We care about the advancement of electric cars,” said Musk during an interview with Danish newspaper, Borsen. “To that end, we also open sourced all of our patents. So, we said any car company can use our technology — it’s no problem. They don’t even have to pay a fee to us,” said Musk. He has even commented that he hopes Lucid moves along faster than they have announced.

Although there is a rise of electric cars globally, in the United States, only 0.9 percent of overall car sales are electric vehicles. This leaves the U.S. in third place for number of electric cars sold with China and European countries in the lead. There have been cumulatively over 570,000 electric vehicles sold the US through December 2016.

Luxury vehicles with electric capabilities are still lacking in number. Musk wants to see more cars come out with luxury capabilities that benefit our future.

Tesla and Lucid both have plans to enhance the usage of electric cars. Many popular car companies also have their version of electric cars that are not luxury vehicles. Toyota’s Prius, Volkswagen’s E-golf, Nissan’s Leaf and Chevy’s Volt are all cars that have made an impact in the electric car market.