What is Lucid thinking?

Lucid is out there making the best electric vehicles mankind has seen. Well, actually, that 'seen' part is kind of a problem for the American car maker. Nobody except car enthousiasts seem to know about the brand. Which in itself is kind of sad, because I'd very much love to see more of the Air and the Gravity on the public roads.

But it seems like the top brass at the company, which still is lacking a CEO, has no intention of increasing sales or the customer base at all. Instead they seem to be steering the car brand more and more into being a self driving technology company. It has started a collaboration with Nvidia and Uber to get level 4 autonomous Lucid taxis on the roads as soon as possible.

At first glance the move doesn't make sense in the least. Why would you have an already struggling car brand that has yet to make any profit on any sold car, go and explore an innovation that is notably hard to get right, let alone to make a profit in?

Waymo is pretty much the only one in the space that has working self driving cars, but it still runs into significant problems all the time. It's still unclear when the technology will be mature enough to work on a broader scale, because of the tiny problems it keeps running into that are getting harder and harder to fix.

Even Tesla is now pulling back on the promise to scale its Robotaxi service extremely quickly and has said it hopes to be in 8 to 10 regions in the next couple of months. Which already seems a lofty target as is.

So by going into self driving, Lucid seems to be entering into a gunfight not with a knife, but at best with a paperclip. Speculation is suggesting the company is not doing it out of its own free will, but is kind of being forced into it because the biggest investor, the Saudi PIF, want to get a foothold in the upcoming market. Lucid is an obvious tool to do it with.

But maybe, just maybe, the move is a genius marketing move to get more exposure. I mean, Lucid is grabbing some headlines here and there with the weird move. But that might not be the main point. As I've been hearing from people working at the brand, the main issue is getting people into the car. Once they've experienced a Lucid, they want one. Making them a self driving taxi is both a low key way of getting many different people into Lucid's and at the same time showing off the technical capabilities and incredible spaciousness of the vehicles the brand makes. 

I know new spokesperson for Lucid Timothy Chalamet isn't going to do that personally. You know how I know? Because I wrote his name wrong and you didn't even notice. It's Timothée Chalamet. 

In other words: even if the move is mostly about getting into an incredibly hard to break into and even harder to get right technology, it's going to get a lot more Lucid's under a large amount of asses of people. 

At the same time Lucid is already teasing a cheaper model, which will also have level 4 autonomous driving capabilities. It's called 'Project Midsize' and will be a Tesla Model Y-fighter, according to the teaser images.

Now, my weird mind could explain the move into self driving, but adding it to a cheaper model that is supposed to appeal to the masses, I cannot. The one issue Lucid is facing, is that its cars are expensive. I do think you get what you pay for, but 80+K is out of reach for a lot of us. Getting a Lucid around 40, maybe 50K would be a good move, but adding expensive self driving tech, makes that even harder than it already is.

I'm also highly doubting that customers with a bit less cash to spend on an EV will want to pay for a technology that they most likely aren't allowed to use because of lagging road regulations. I mean, we're seeing car companies deleting LiDAR-sensors off cars at this moment, just because they think self driving wont be here for another decade, so there is no sense in letting people pay for it.

But hey, even if all fails, you can't argue that these days it just reflects wel on your company if by one way or another, you partner with Nvidia...

In other news:

You probably know the YangWang U9, the fastest production car on the planet as of now. But I'm guessing you didn't know it was for a large part 3D-printed into existence. But not using regular 3D printers, no, BYD had to go the extra mile to show off their engineering prowess with what they call 'multidimensional surface parametric modelling'. In other words: "Engineers used laser melting and custom alloys to achieve sub-millimeter accuracy in the U9X body". I still don't fully understand what that means, but it sounds cool, right?

New car brand Scout, the subsidiary of VW which will only produce cool looking and rugged SUV's, has recently opened reservations. They prove to be very popular with 130.000 reservation already in the bag. But the weird thing is that over 80 percent of people wanting a Scout, opt for the one with the range extender. That means people are willing to drive fully electric, when they can charge the batteries with a small combustion engine in the car that does exactly that. That either proves we're going back in time to when the Fisker Karma was still a innovative and cool car, or that Americans are very afraid of cars that don't require any time of gasoline to run.

Going back in time doesn't have to be a bad thing. Especially when it involves a new V8 engine, which everybody knows is the best engine in the world. Toyota is not saying exactly that, but it is saying the glorious 8-cilinder will be making a comeback. It might even be used in Lexi, or maybe it's Lexusses, or just Lexus'? Who knows, it's good news either way.