A Veteran Tesla Factory Executive Jumps Ship For EV Rival Lucid
The Lucid Air electric luxury sedan is to go into production in 2020 at the company's factory in Arizona
Lucid Motors, a startup maker of luxury electric cars that plans to start building its first model next year, hired a veteran Tesla manufacturing executive as investors and analysts wait for Tesla to report its quarterly delivery and production results.
Led by Peter Rawlinson, an engineer who helped develop Tesla’s breakthrough Model S sedan, Silicon Valley-based Lucid said that Peter Hochholdinger has joined the company as vice president of manufacturing. Hochholdinger was previously Tesla’s vice president of production, a role he’d held since May 2016, a turbulent period marked by what CEO Elon Musk dubbed the “manufacturing hell” of ramping up Model 3 output. Before joining Tesla, he spent 24 years at Audi.
His departure was reported last week.
Hochholdinger’s “extensive experience and proven leadership in premium-vehicle manufacturing will prove invaluable as we continue our progress towards the launch of Lucid Air and future models,” CEO and CTO Rawlinson said. “In joining Lucid, Peter is empowered to create an industry-leading manufacturing process that will deliver the quality products our discerning customers demand and deserve.”
Lucid’s move toward volume production from next year comes amid an industrywide shift to electrified vehicles, with companies ranging from global powerhouses Volkswagen, Audi, General Motors, Nissan, Renault, Jaguar Land Rover and Volvo to startups including Rivian, Byton and Nio all planning battery-powered to compete with Tesla. The Air, which Lucid has been developing for more than three years, is to be even more premium than Tesla’s Model S, priced from over $100,000.
Lucid has raised more than $1 billion to get into production, with Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund signing on as a major backer in September 2018, just after Musk incorrectly claimed he’d secured funding from the Saudis to take Tesla private. (Tesla’s CEO lost his chairmanship as a result of his inaccurate tweets and both he and the company were fined by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.)
Lucid’s factory is to be built in Casa Grande, Arizona, midway between Phoenix and Tucson, and, initially, will be relatively small scale, with capacity to produce just 20,000 units a year.
Executive turnover has been unusually high at Tesla in the past few years. Last month, a key member of its Autopilot team left to lead the development of visual perception technology for Embark, a startup developing self-driving trucks.
