This electric car can go 520 miles on a charge but the CEO doesn’t think that’s
It’s not just a little longer, either. The Air goes an estimated 115 miles farther on a charge than the Tesla. It’s even farther than most gasoline cars can travel on a full tank.
But Lucid’s chief executive Peter Rawlinson, who once worked at Tesla and helped engineer the original Model S, thinks that jaw-dropping number, 520 miles, isn’t actually terribly important. For one thing, that range doesn’t come cheap. Prices for the Lucid Air sedan start at $74,000, but prices for the Dream Edition are more than double that, starting at $169,000.
Behind that figure, though, is another rarely discussed statistic that Rawlinson thinks will decide the winners and losers in the future world of electric cars: efficiency.
With greater energy efficiency, which contributes to the Lucid Air’s long range, electric cars will become accessible at all price ranges, he said. In fact, one of Rawlinson’s side projects is applying some of the efficiency tricks used at Lucid to something he calls the “T21,” meaning “the Model T for the 21st century.” This would be a car with fairly long driving range that almost anyone can afford.
“The Model T Ford really mobilized mankind in the last century, the 20th century,” Rawlinson said. “Ultimately, it had a devastating impact upon the planet. We have got this generation of engineers and technologists and designers. It is within our grasp to try to redress the damage that mankind has caused.”
Lucid, a California-based company, recently started production of the Air electric sedan at its Arizona factory.
Some of the same sorts of techniques used to design expensive cars with very long range can help do that, Rawlinson said, can be applied to cheap cars that will drive shorter distances that remain practical for most people.
The balancing act
Like huge horsepower numbers on performance cars, long range on electric cars will be something people can brag about, but that will have little practical use in real life, Rawlinson said. After all, most electric vehicle owners will charge overnight at home or at work and, when they take long trips, public chargers will be available at intervals of much less than 500 miles.
And the trick to getting longer range figures isn’t particularly hard with current technology, Rawlinson said. When it comes to getting long range, or just useful range, the easiest way to do it is to just pack in more batteries.
“I call that dumb running,” said Rawlinson. “That is not tech.”
Increasing efficiency is a way to break that connection.
“If I could get 20% more efficiency, I can go 20% further for a given amount of energy,” Rawlinson said. “The corollary of that is that, conversely I could go the same distance with 20% less battery.”
For the T21 car project, Rawlinson envisions a battery pack weighing about 275 pounds that would take the compact car…
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