Former Employees of Elon Musk to Start Rolling out a “Tesla Killer”
By Marko Vidrih on The Capital
American electric car manufacturer Lucid Motors, who is also called the “Tesla killer,” has built a plant in the Arizona desert.
The company is located on 6.7 hectares 80 kilometers from the largest city in the state — Phoenix, Bloomberg writes. The American startup is funded by the Saudi Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, PIF. Investments in the project amounted to 1 billion dollars.
Peter Rawlinson, a former Tesla employee, and Tesla Model S chief engineer takes over the company’s CEO position. Peter Hochholdinger, formerly vice president of production at Tesla, is now Lucid Motors’s vice president.
The construction work at the Lucid Motors factory is already fully completed, the company is currently engaged in the installation of equipment. The company will launch the first model of an electric car under the name Lucid Air from the assembly line until the end of 2020. Its cost will be about 100 thousand dollars.
In the beginning, Lucid Motors intends to produce tens of thousands of cars, but over time they plan to bring production to a capacity of 380 thousand units per year. This is more than Tesla’s performance. Musk’s California plant in 2019 delivered about 367.5 thousand electric cars.
Lucid Motors is going to open showrooms in California and Florida in 2020, in Chicago, New York, Washington and Europe in 2021.
The coronavirus pandemic practically did not interfere with the company’s plans to launch the plant, the agency said. The Arizona authorities, unlike the leadership of other states, did not stop construction work on their territory during the epidemic.
In addition, the company managed to resolve the issue of equipment supplies on time. The leadership of Lucid Motors said that since mid-March the company has actually expanded: it has already hired 120 new employees and opened an additional 250 new vacancies.
Other Tesla competitors are not so lucky. Chinese startup Byton was forced to lay off half of the workers in California and postpone the start of car assembly in China. The American company Rivian, despite serious support from investors such as Amazon and Ford, has also postponed the start of production of its electric pickups.
Author: Marko Vidrih
Featured image credit: Unsplash
