Over-promising and under-delivering isn’t a good business practice. Lucid Motors is learning that the hard way after the company’s chief technology officer, Peter Rawlinson, admitted to Automotive News that it’s going to need more money before it can make good on its promise to be a game-changing electric car maker.
According to Rawlinson, the company is looking to secure its next series of financing before it can proceed with breaking ground on a $700 million production facility in Arizona that will house the production of the Lucid Air electric sedan. The company is touting the car as the first real challenger to the Tesla Model S. More cautiously, Rawlinson added that it would be “irresponsible to start moving fast or start anything until we have a financial runway to execute that professionally and with absolute integrity.”
The statement comes with a tinge of humility – one that flies against what the company said in December 2016 when it stood on a pulpit and proudly and quite loudly told anybody willing to listen it was going to take the fight to Tesla. Its vehicle was promised to beat the Model S in several conceivable ways, including a range of more than 400 miles thanks to a larger battery pack. The startup alluded to its partnership with Samsung SDI as its trump card, confident that despite the ills Samsung has been through in recent years, it still had a product that could reshape the electric car industry in the future.
None of that will matter though if Lucid can’t find the funds it needs to get the project off the ground. That’s the most pressing issue Lucid Motors will have to deal with, although at this point, it might be better for the company to tone down on the rhetoric before it knows it has a product that can literally live up to them.
Continue after the jump to read the full story.
from Top Speed http://ift.tt/2pzBaZM
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