Lucid Motors’ dream of building its first all-electric car is one step closer to becoming reality.
The startup has announced that a beta engineering prototype of the Air luxury EV has performed its inaugural drive in November. Before you ask why this matters, the company claims the Lucid Air beta prototype is 95-percent production-representative.
These beta prototypes share many of design cues with the previous alpha series but their engineering has been further developed. “This is a new generation of technology. It embodies all the advances of the last several years, and — in particular — our battery technology is now race-proven,” CEO Peter Rawlinson said.
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Interestingly, the beta engineering prototype was built at the company’s headquarters in Silicon Valley and not at Lucid Motors’ future factory in Casa Grande, Arizona. This is an unusual approach considering that the aluminum body structures themselves (80 in total) were also built at the HQ. “This level of in-house construction is a logical yet unusual move. I’m not aware of any other company on the West Coast with that degree of in-house capability,” said Rawlinson.
The company claims the decision helps it “control quality to exacting standards, accrue knowledge of assembly conditions, and compare laser scans and tolerance conditions with core digital data from CAD.” At the same time, the Arizona plant employees learn the build on-site so they can return and share their knowledge with teams at the manufacturing facility.
Lucid Motors says production is not far away, with the Arizona plant expected to start building cars in late 2020. Until then, beta prototypes will be tested intensively.