Peter Rawlinson isn’t just building a car company. In fact, Lucid Motors’ CEO and CTO sees cars as only a small fraction of the electric vehicle startup’s future business.
“I’d love it to be 20-80. Twenty percent doing cars, 80% licensing,” he told InsideEVs in an interview at the BloombergNEF Summit in San Francisco. “Because the vision I have for Lucid is: Just as there’s an Intel inside your laptop, there’s a Lucid inside a Honda or a Toyota.”
Intel rode the personal computing revolution by supplying processors to electronics companies like IBM and Apple. Rawlinson thinks Lucid could play a similar role for EVs—by selling its EV powertrains to the world’s car manufacturers.
Photo by: Tim Levin/InsideEVs
The Lucid Air launched in 2021 as the automaker’s first model.
He didn’t specify a timeline for when Lucid might begin raking in 80% of its revenue from licensing deals with other automakers. But he made clear that a big reason for Lucid selling cars at all is to market its underlying technology.
“People think, ‘Oh, why didn’t you just be a supplier, Peter?’ Because we need the cars as a shop window for our product,” he said. Lucid also plans to expand the reach of that “shop window.” It’s targeting production of 1 million cars per year by the early 2030s, up from around 9,000 in 2024.
Packed with tech developed in-house, Lucid’s cars make for a compelling showcase. The California-based company’s first model, the Air sedan, hit the scene in 2021 as the first EV able to drive over 500 miles on a full battery. With 520 miles of range, it went over 100 miles more than any Tesla can do right now. The top-of-the-line Air Sapphire makes 1,234 horsepower, hits 60 mph in under two seconds and still manages to go an EPA-estimated 427 miles per charge.
Listen to Rawlinson speak in an interview or on an earnings call, and the conversation will invariably shift to energy efficiency, which the CEO sees as a primary edge. Even if “miles per kilowatt-hour” isn’t exactly a concept that resonates with the general public, he makes a strong case for why it matters. Lucid’s laser-focus on squeezing out incremental efficiency gains throughout its cars means the Air and just-released Gravity SUV can go farther than rivals while—importantly—also requiring fewer expensive batteries. Rawlinson sees a huge cost advantage there going forward, even if the company is unprofitable today.
Lucid has supplied battery tech in the past for Formula E, the electric racing series. And one automaker has signed on as a customer too: Aston Martin. The British carmaker inked a $450 million deal to use Lucid’s motors, battery technology and “Wunderbox,” which facilitates charging, in its upcoming electric model. The startup has said it’s in talks with other car companies too.
Under the Aston deal, Lucid will make powertrain components at its factory in Arizona and ship them to the U.K. But, ideally, future arrangements will work a bit differently, Rawlinson said. He wants to license Lucid’s tech to carmakers, so they can manufacture components like battery packs, motors and transmission units themselves.
“But if you’re going to do a big automaker, we’d license the tech. They’d manufacture the hardware under license in their factories… But that wouldn’t work until the encrypted flash of software comes from us,” he said. “You flash your Microsoft Office—ka-chunk—Bill Gates gets his royalty, doesn’t he? And I want to be like that.”
This is part of why, as the EV policy landscape seems poised to shift dramatically in the U.S. under the Trump administration, Rawlinson isn’t too worried. Sure, he says, something like the tax credit for EV leases going away would be “less than ideal.” But at the end of the day, if a rollback of EV incentives and regulations pushes rivals to pump the brakes on EV development, that’s a boon to Lucid.
Photo by: Lucid Motors
The Lucid Gravity SUV goes on sale to the wider public this year.
“Isn’t it great they’re going to slow down,” he said. “In a few years’ time, there’ll be this realization—’Oh my god, we’re going to have to go to a sustainable mode of transportation’—well, then we will be in a much better position to offer those companies that haven’t invested in the technology our technology through licensing.”
With earnings coming up soon and a quiet period in place, Rawlinson takes care to mention that this is all less of a concrete business plan and more of a general vision for the company.
“I’m not making any promises,” he said. “And the reason that is not baked into our financials is I can’t guarantee that any of that’s going to happen.”
Got a tip about the EV world? Contact the author: Tim.Levin@InsideEVs.com
