Lucid Motors CEO Peter Rawlinson was for a time the engineer responsible for Tesla’s Model S. He left to run Lucid Motors, whose Lucid Air is one of the best streetcars on the market. However, in addition to the new car, the young manufacturer is facing the start-up of a new factory and it has proven difficult to optimize, resulting in continual production cuts.
Lucid boss tells Germans Air it’s better than Taycan
Even before he started producing Air, Rawlinson was ‘pecking’ at the competition. In addition to criticizing Tesla, he told the German press that his Lucid Air was clearly better than the Porsche Taycan, without it being possible to compare them, criticizing the engineer responsible for the German model. Unsurprisingly, this ability to make enemies can always lead to backlash, potentially more apparent as difficulties begin to arise. Unfortunately for Rawlinson, they’ve already started.
Elon Musk Verifies Lucid CEO
In a factory that was designed to produce 400,000 units a year, the goal for 2022 was to reach 20,000 Air, roughly what Porsche makes with the Taycan and slightly less than Tesla makes with the Model S. quality, fires and Difficulties with suppliers led Lucid to curb expectations for this year, lowering them in April to the range between 12,000 and 14,000 units. After this initial cut of 40%, it was enough to wait a few months for the production volume in 2022 to fall again, this time by another 50%, being reduced to 6,000/7,000 vehicles.
I had more kids in Q2 than cars!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 4, 2022
This succession of poor results aroused the desire of the competitors to settle accounts in relation to the past. For this reason, the CEO of Tesla could not resist reacting to a comment by analyst Gary Black, regarding the poor results obtained by Lucid Motors in the 2nd quarter -in which it manufactured only 679 vehicles and earned 97 million dollars-. Black also recalled Musk’s warnings about difficulties starting production, to which the Tesla CEO responded with a cheep jocular: “I made more kids in the second trimester than cars.”
It is obviously a joke, with a certain flavor of revenge, given that Musk did not have 679 children in the quarter. He did not even have any, since the last two elements of his offspring are twins and will have been born in November, adding the leader of Tesla and SpaceX, for the moment, a total of nine children. If anything, a more impressive number, child-wise, than the 679 vehicles assembled by Lucid from April to June.
Source: Observadora
