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Lucid dreams
Lucid dreams Imperial alumnus and CEO of Lucid Motors, Peter Rawlinson, talks design, engineering and innovation in the automotive industry, and shares what he learned working with Elon Musk.
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owards the end of July 2021, electric vehicle (EV) startup, Lucid Motors, began trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange with a valuation of almost US$40 billion. Founded by Imperial alumnus Peter Rawlinson (BSc Mechanical Engineering 1979) – both the company’s Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer – Lucid is due to launch its muchanticipated first car this spring. Mixing world-first design with impeccable environmental credentials and the latest technology, the Lucid Air Dream is set to shake up both the EV and luxury vehicle markets. As its website says: “There’s luxury, and then there’s Lucid”. We spoke with Peter about how he got started, his esteemed place in history as Tesla’s former Vice President of Engineering, and what’s next for the future of EVs.
You’ve worked at numerous automobile companies in the past. What have you learned from working with them? When I first left Imperial, I went to Austin Morris for a couple of years. I think I was probably one of the first people in the UK to attempt to design a car on a computer – on CAD. Everyone was on a drawing board and there was this newfangled computer system installed in the design office. I thought “I’ve got to try and learn this. This is just up my street!”. There was only one colour on the screen at the time – monochrome green – and I knew I’d gone too far when I’d drive home at night and white fences would look pink. I didn’t twig it at the start – I thought they were pink fences – but then I realised it was affecting my eyes, so I went back to the drawing board (both literally and figuratively).
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Then I was at Jaguar in the 1980s. I was fortunate to be part of a small but very advanced group of people who were experimenting to make the computerised design of a car. It was absolutely revolutionary. I was lucky to work for the new chief engineer who had a PhD in computer science. Jaguar had brought him in to change the way they did things, but he didn’t really want to design cars. This was perfect for me, so we had someone who was great at facilitating new technology, but who let vehicle engineers like me just get on with it. It was fantastic! I remember I had to do shift work because the computer I was using was worth five times my annual salary, so we had to get two shifts of people using it. When I went to Lotus, I couldn’t believe they were still on drawing boards. This was in the 1990s, so I announced we were
moving onto computers. I rose through the ranks at Lotus and ended up as Chief Engineer of Advanced Engineering, largely because I knew how to do this one new thing – the digital design of cars. Was it tricky to implement this new way of doing things? Was there friction, or was everyone quite accepting? I think there was quite a widespread acceptance at Lotus – I don’t remember any resistance. I think we just drove it and it started taking off. When I went to Chorus Automotive in the Midlands and ran the Vehicle Engineering department there, that’s where we really started pushing the science. We looked at intelligent programmes where the computer would actually design bits of the car for you – it was all the rage in the 1990s! At Chorus, we Issue 4 / 2021–22
