“I think this is very important,” Rawlinson says, “because if you look at the amount of electricity it takes to mobilise cars, I don’t think that’s an issue. The average person may travel about 20-30 miles a day, because not everybody is doing long commutes.
“Lucid can do five miles per kilowatt hour now [on the US test, which is more stringent than the WLTP test used in Europe and the UK]. To get that 20 miles [range], it requires only 4kWh in a 24-hour cycle.
“Don’t tell me there isn’t enough electricity on the grid. That isn’t the issue. I think people shouldn’t have to be thinking in terms of going to fast charge.
“They should be charging overnight when the electricity is cheaper, when the grid is down, when the electricity is available. It’s better for the power stations, because they’re not coking up and coking down in a 24-hour cycle. I’m a big advocate of working on the infrastructure of overnight, slower, AC charging at home or on the street.”
This brings us to the issue of EVs’ affordability. “I’m not surprised [that they’re expensive],” says Rawlinson. “It’s because car makers are going down the range route as a function of battery size. Lucid never did this. Range is a function of our efficiency, through technology.
“If you go down the route of range as a function of battery size, the only way you will achieve range is putting more batteries in, and that will cost so much more.
“How can you make that vehicle affordably? You can’t, because you’ve got to stuff all those expensive batteries in. And this is the problem. This is the whole wrong mindset. Our technology enables cars to have the range without the cost of those batteries.
“And this is going to play out over the next few years. People aren’t seeing it today, because we’ve got high-end cars which compete with Mercedes and Porsche. It will play out when we have more affordable cars.”
