Lucid Motors is ready to launch its first electric car, the Lucid Air, on Wednesday (September 9, 2020) online from its headquarters in Silicon Valley. Price and other specs will not be released until the launch, what Lucid has shared so far suggests that the Air will give the Tesla Model S a real run for its money. Lucid says the battery in its luxury electric sedan will go 517 miles on a single charge, which is several hundred more than the Model S and the Porsche Taycan. Eric Bach VP of hardware engineering at Lucid Motors said last month that the Air would deliver “the world’s fastest-charging ever offered” in an EV, charging 300 miles in just 20 minutes.
Lucid Motors was founded in 2007 as a battery maker called Atieva, then relaunched itself as Lucid Motors in 2016. They were set to premiere the Air, their first car, at the New York Auto Show in April, however, COVID19 put a halt to any car shows. According to Derek Jenkins VP of Design at Lucid Motors now is the time to unveil the Lucid Air. He told Yahoo Finance UK that “not launching and just hanging back is just not an option,” as they have been building up to this point for nearly five years and the auto industry is changing rapidly.
“It is a race of technology, a race to engage with customers and a push towards electrification, and we want to stay on the forefront of that,” Jenkins added.
“Obviously everybody’s had to shift gears and think about how they do a launch,” Jenkins said. He feels that pivoting to a digital launch “has been in some ways a benefit to us, as it has forced us to dive deeper on how we want to explain the many amazing things about Lucid.”
The major selling point of Lucid’s online consumer journey is a “groundbreaking” 3-D configurator, which allows people to configure the most realistic view of how they want their new car to look. The configurator was developed by ZeroLight, who has specialized in Cloud-based 3D visualizations for the auto industry for the last 5 years.
“We also call it the digital twin, a popular term which means it’s a virtual copy of the real car, behaves like the real car, and has all same configuration options as the real car,” ZeroLight chief product officer Francois de Bodinat told Yahoo Finance UK.
ZeroLight is aiming to drag the dealership experience into the digital age too, with virtual showrooms, where customers can configure cars and have remote one-on-ones with a dealer.
“The decline in visits to auto shows, the decline of visits to the dealerships, it was all things that we saw happening before COVID,” De Bodinat says. “COVID has just accelerated that trend for us — and before COVID we were already pushing the fact that decision-making processes happen online.”
De Bodinat says the consumer was always more ready for the shift to online sales than car companies were, but “finally, they are catching up with other industries that have been doing that for years.”
Despite the bulk of the consumer’s purchase journey happening online, a virtual-reality configurator won’t replace a test drive for many buyers, especially for such a big-ticket item.
Lucid Motors, which will offer online car purchase and delivery, is also going to open its own stores where people can check out the car. Lucid plans to open 15 stores over the next year across North America, their first store will open in Beverly Hills in September.
