Electric vehicle upstart Lucid Motors is in talks with other automakers about sharing its technology and plans to go public in a few years, but the company isn’t considering a potential sale. Bloomberg caught up with Chief Technology Officer Peter Rawlinson, who said the company remains on track to build the Air EV sedan in late 2020 for first deliveries in early 2021.
“We’re not contemplating a sale,” Rawlinson told Bloomberg TV‘s Emily Chang. “What we would contemplate is potential partnerships in technology. We think we have world class technology that all the world could benefit from,” adding that many automakers “haven’t got the technology that we’ve developed, and I think they could benefit from that.”
Rawlinson didn’t name any of the companies the company was talking with. In 2017, Lucid reportedly approached Ford with a proposal that it buy the company, but no such deal materialized.
Lucid last year took a $1 billion-plus investment from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund to help launch the Air at the same time Elon Musk was playing footsie with the PIF for his ultimately doomed proposal to take Tesla private. The Newark, Calif.-based company plans to build a factory in Casa Grande, Ariz.
The company has been talking about the idea of sharing its powertrain technology since at least the 2017 New York Auto Show, where it exhibited the Air, a 1,000-horsepower all-wheel-drive sedan with a 100-kWh battery (or an optional 130-kWh version, which nudges driving range up to 400 miles).
Rawlinson said the company will start off selling pricier versions of the Air, at an “average over $100,000” but gradually begin offering less-expensive versions, with the goal of offering them as cheap as $60,000, which would buy you a 400-hp, single-motor, rear-wheel-drive version of the EV. He said plans call for ramping up production in 2021 and 2022 to hit 50,000 units per year within two or three years.
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