13 minute read
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.
Towards 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.
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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). 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
acted as a very advanced material science engineering consultancy for a lot of car companies internationally, and I travelled extensively in North America, Europe and the Far East consulting on advanced technologies to design cars. Rather than actually designing cars, it was helping people to design cars better and consulting on the academic side of how they did things.
I also made the Think electric vehicle in Norway and we got the best difference-to-weight ratio of any production car and a better crash performance than Volvo at that time – all with a very small team.
How did you start working with Elon Musk at Tesla?
I got a call in early 2009 from someone who had joined Tesla and he said: “I think Elon should speak with you”. Elon called and we had a chat. He wanted to meet the next day, so I flew out and met him and we had dinner together. I joined Tesla two weeks later. They were designing the Model S. The idea was that it was to be a great fusion between a Silicon Valley computer approach and traditional automotive experience. Clearly the implication was that the Silicon Valley people at Tesla were the computer whizzkids and I was a middle-aged git who stood for the traditional experience – but it was completely the other way around! I was trying to ram computer science down the throats of Silicon Valley Stanford graduates who were resisting it.
I set up Tesla’s Vehicle Engineering department upstairs at SpaceX, because we didn’t have our own place, and we designed the Model S there. I did it with a tiny team and a big amount of computer-aided engineering (CAE) analytical support and supercomputer power. I had less people designing and more people analysing than in any other programme I’d worked on. We did the whole car in three years with 140 people instead of 1,400 people which had never been done before.
I worked with Elon for three years as Chief Engineer on the design of the Model S and Model X, and as Vice President of Engineering for Tesla. I drove the computer science to another level there. It was a very academic approach to designing cars. The Model S is still in production today and there’s still no better electric car – until later this year when the Lucid Air comes out!
So, how did your involvement with Lucid Motors start?
I got a call from a small battery company in California – a ‘mom and pop shop’ called Atieva. They’d just received some investment and asked me if I’d like to do an electric car with them. I said yes, but there were two conditions. The first was that we’d have to try to create the best car in the world, as I wanted to take it to the next level after doing the Model S. They were a bit shocked, but I explained that I had a vision for what that car could be like and the things that differentiated it. I told them my plan for a ‘space concept’, where the car is smaller on the outside and bigger on the inside – like Doctor Who’s TARDIS – which is possible when you miniaturise the powertrain because you can lay it all out in a different way. So you can have all this interior space in a compact, easyto-park, environmentally friendly, super sports car that’s fun to drive.
My second condition was that the company change its name from Atieva, as I didn’t think they were going to sell many cars with that name, so we renamed it ‘Lucid’. We wanted a name like nothing else on the planet, as that’s what we wanted for the car.
Who would you say your competitors are?
We’re really competing with petrol cars. There’s a big misunderstanding that we’re competing with electric cars – we’re not. There isn’t really a market as such for electric cars, there’s just a market for cars. There are two things that put people off buying an electric car – the price and the range. In every other respect, an electric car is better. Once you drive one, you think it’s the best thing ever, but the price and the range hold it back.
Inevitably, every magazine article is comparing us with Tesla, but I think we’re really competing with luxury cars such as the S-Class Mercedes, Audi, BMW, Porsche, Jaguar, Lexus, maybe the Nissan Infiniti – particularly with our first car, the Lucid Air Dream Edition, which we’re selling for US$169,000 (about £122,500) all in. It’s a pretty expensive car with a limited run, but we’ll get that price down to about US$70,000 (about £50,500) within around 18 months for a more basic version of the car. Then we’ll get an SUV out before doing another platform and aiming for a car which is maybe sub-US$50,000 (about £36,000).
We’ve got the largest ‘frunk’ (front trunk) of any car other than the new Ford F150 Lightning electric pickup truck. The Mercedes Benz EQS – their new flagship luxury electric car – has the latest technology but they’ve got no frunk and the bonnet is permanently fitted down so, as a customer, you can’t open it. The service centre can access it, but the customer can’t because there’s no reason to lift it as it’s not serviceable – it’s all electronics and motor. It takes up so much space that there’s no room for a frunk!
What’s the most challenging part about starting your own venture?
Getting money is the most challenging – the engineering’s almost the easy bit for me! The first thing I had to do was get the company US$200 million just to get it kicked off. We did that and then the next big step was finding the Saudi public investment fund who put faith in us. They then invested well over US$1 billion, and we recently secured another US$4.4 billion, so we’re pushing on towards US$7 billion raised since I’ve been with the company – it’s very capital intensive. The commercial side is the challenge because you’ve got to convince people not to invest millions, or tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions – you need to have billions, otherwise you’re dead! That’s very tough.
What have been the best bits?
I think it’s probably the sense of potential achievement. I’ve been paid for doing my hobby of designing cars all my life. Originally, I wanted to be a farmer – I was brought up in rural South Wales and I just loved the countryside. I saw it change for the worse and my heart bled. I see the
decimation of the woodland and the rural environment that I was brought up in and I fear for the erosion of that biodiversity. The climatic changes we’re experiencing really, really frighten me and I’m very gravely concerned. It’s not just global warming, it’s the almost irresponsible intensive agriculture I’ve seen in rural Britain – it’s wholly inappropriate. Just the way hedgerows are mechanically cut, rather than traditionally laid, so it totally decimates the biodiversity and biointensity.
Now I feel like I’ve gone full circle because I can influence the future of mobility by really pushing the technology. It’s not about how many cars I can sell – it’s much bigger than that. In our factory, we can only make 30,000 cars – it’s a drop in the ocean. The real benefit to mankind and the real mission is to push the technological envelope to a whole other level. I genuinely believe Lucid is doing that. We’ve got the most advanced powertrain in the world, by several years on everyone else. That’s going to come out this year and people are going to be shocked. It’s all about efficiency – Tesla’s running at 400 volts and we’ve got a 900-volt car. We’re getting 4.5 miles per kWh with a big luxury car. Some of our competitors are only getting about 2.25 miles per kWh – they’re burning twice the amount of energy to go the same distance as we are. Just imagine what we could do with a small car! We’ve got a step change in our tech – all the lab data is indicating that. We can make EVs more efficient, and our tech can percolate out through all the other manufacturers and really have an incredible impact upon the planet. That could really change the world!
What advice do you have for founders starting their own businesses?
I think there are three facets to success: ability, absolute commitment – not just hours but how smart you are with your commitment – and luck. Without all three, I think you’re going to fail. You can be brilliant and very committed, but if you’re so damn unlucky, you’re not going to get anywhere. If you’re brilliant and you’re lucky, you might get a little way, but if you haven’t got the commitment, you’re not going to do much with it.
The key thing I really learned at Tesla was to put all your chips in on success. Don’t do all these action plans for retreating from battle. He who dares wins – just totally go for it! Even that depends on ability, effort and luck, though.
What’s your advice on putting a team together?
I prize intellect over experience. Give me smart people rather than experienced ones who might have been doing the wrong thing for the last 20 years. You do need a mix, though. What I tend to do is combine experienced smart people with the young guns who challenge you.
The other facet I always look for is whether a person knows the laws of physics and the core principles of maths. So many people say they’ve forgotten it, but I use the basic laws of physics that I learned at school and at Imperial every day, even now in my position. If you’re going to make a world-class product, it has to be distilled to the universal laws of physics. What I tried to do with the Model S, and now with the Lucid Air, is to say that I don’t care what any other car companies are like or what other cars are like – I don’t want a benchmark and I don’t want targets. The target is to make the car amazing.
That’s what I did with the Model S and it’s now been in production for nine years – there’s still nothing like it and no one else has come close. It was a ‘laws of physics’ car and the Lucid Air is a ‘laws of physics’ car too.
As you know, Imperial really encourages students to embrace their entrepreneurial side while they’re studying. What piece of advice would you give current Imperial students?
That you’ve got to pick the right area for your future. I remember when I was at grammar school, someone said to me that I shouldn’t be doing mechanical engineering – I should be doing electronics instead, as that was the future. I think you’ve got to choose something which is linked to the future so that you’ve got a fair wind in your sails. Don’t try to do something that’s going to make you swim against the tide. I don’t think there’s a recipe – there’s a flukish amount of luck involved, so just accept that. Lucid Motors has been valued at close to US$40 billion now – we’re worth nearly double Nissan and we haven’t even sold a car yet! We now need to prove that we’re real by getting the car into production – that’s what really matters.
