9 ms·

Tesla’s head of production is going to EV startup Lucid Motors

71 points by gibolt 7y ago

camjohnson26 7y ago
> Lucid Motors has kind of spun out of Tesla. It was started by a former Tesla board member and executive and it is led by Peter Rawlinson, the former chief engineer of the Tesla Model S. > Several other Tesla engineers and executives have also joined the startup and they are now also adding Hochholdinger to the team
- agumonkey 7y ago
  will this be a fairchild / intel moment ?
- FireBeyond 7y ago
  Is it really a spin off? Or more of an abandoning of ship?
- ricardobeat 7y ago
  What’s with this recent trend of simply posting quotes from the article in HN? Haven’t we all just finished reading those exact words, what value is this adding to the discussion?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Shorn 7y ago
    I rarely read the article, this comment surfaced an interesting aspect.
  - camjohnson26 7y ago
    Maybe people have never heard of Lucid motors and want to know if it’s worth clicking.
atonse 7y ago
Is this sort of how they're trying to make a Tesla without Musk? By just leaving one by one and recreating the company without Musk, instead of just firing him? Really curious as to what the motivations might be here for all these people to leave (apart from the monetary benefits of joining another "Tesla" even earlier).
- gibolt 7y ago
  Most Tesla employees want to work on EVs, and it is a natural inclination for employees to move towards newer, shinier projects and want to switch company at some point. Lucid probably makes that choice super easy, since you'll be working with familiar faces. The early employees are likely the best to create a new electric car company, since they were the foundation of the current industry leader.
  - atonse 7y ago
    I agree – I'm just wondering what the draw is. Maybe Tesla has gone into maintenance mode with refinements to their cars, and these folks are fundamentally builders and want to build something radically different. But when you look at it, they're building another Model S.
    - rhacker 7y ago
      From my point of view that means it's either pay or people issues. Personally I don't like starting over on APIs etc.. if you ever switched from a company that has a foundation to one that doesn't you end up with employees that say things like - oh darn we actually had a really good X at company Y. At least they can start over and build with fewer mistakes, but hitting the same tasks again is often annoying.
      - gibolt 7y ago
        I'd guess it is the opposite. Some people like startups because nothing is defined, everything is new. Having the option to build something you liked is better than being forced to use what is already used 'because it exists'.
zyang 7y ago
This is reminiscent of Shockley and the traitorous eight.
bdcravens 7y ago
Interesting name: "Lucid" This implies clarity. I personally think Tesla vehicles may fit the needs of a small percentage of the population (kind of like the new Mac Pro), but are overkill for everyone else, and the excitement in EV's is changing the world for future generations. This requires a car you can sell to everyone, not just those who would drop $80k on a car (or even $40k). I believe the core of what Tesla could be, a great EV, is obfuscated by things like AutoPilot. Interestingly enough, that's where most of the issues and headlines are as well.
- myrandomcomment 7y ago
  Except Lucid's first car is an over top luxury car that even has an option for exec stye seats in the back for those that have a driver. Their car is a Mac Pro and Tesla is just the 5K iMac. https://lucidmotors.com https://lucidmotors.com
  - throwayEngineer 7y ago
    I work in automotive and I see these small volume companies as a total waste for rich people. Quality in a low volume car is terrible. Things are not tested, so they fail often, and the cars are repaired. I cannot imagine the best engineers building a quality, low volume car. Note that car quality, and features are different things. But even with that, a mainstream luxury brand will destroy these small volume counterparts.
  - bdcravens 7y ago
    Disappointing.
  - reneherse 7y ago
    Having taken a first look at images of the car on their site, I'll say one thing: Lucid has managed a much higher level of aesthetic refinement in their design than Tesla. I'm a huge fan of Tesla overall, and especially their engineering. Unfortunately, despite the pedigree of their design team, I find the aesthetics wanting. In comparison, the Lucid "Air" (as their model is known), seems to rival the best German manufacturers for aesthetics. It has the crispness and ease of a design from a mature luxury car company. So hats off to that achievement, whatever their market or price point. Tesla's sheet metal and interiors are somewhat clumsy in comparison. (It's never a good sign when your car looks best in the curve-hiding color black.)
londons_explore 7y ago
Lucid Motors looks like an almost exact clone of Tesla... The strategy, the design, etc. I wonder how they expect to be better?
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  There often is an advantage to being a second mover. I am sure Tesla made a lot of expensive mistakes that a newcomer can avoid and save a lot of money. The same would apply for SpaceX. They could study a lot of the successful and unsuccessful things other rocket makers had made and then do better.
  - ancorevard 7y ago
    Being the last mover is preferable. To illustrate the point: Google search, the last search engine. Facebook, the last social network.
    - sah2ed 7y ago
      This is only true in certain industries. The examples you cite are Internet companies. Internet companies are peculiar because they exploit the economies of scale of the Internet to primarily offer services, not goods (read physical products). If being last mover offered an advantage to players selling goods, then Windows Phone ought to have trounced Apple iPhone and Google Android since they were a late entrant in the smartphone movement when the paradigm shifted from physical keyboards to touchscreens.
- rasz 7y ago
  Its easy to look good when you dont actually make anything. This is a 12 year old "startup" without a product.
londons_explore 7y ago
Interesting the lucid motors website is available in English and Chinese. I wonder if they're hoping for China to be their main market, or to attract investment from there?
- Meandering 7y ago
  There has been Chinese money backing lucid motors since their early stages. I've seen several articles over the past few years. Seemingly, they are working with a Chinese bus company as well... https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/21/18235019/lucid-motors-electric-suv-ev-saudi-arabia https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/21/18235019/lucid-motors-ele... https://electrek.co/guides/lucid-motors/ https://electrek.co/guides/lucid-motors/
tills13 7y ago
The thing I like the most about Tesla is the cars look futuristic without going _too far_. I feel like every other luxury EV company just goes off the deep end. The 3 and the modern S are the perfect design imo.
- asteli 7y ago
  I think they went overboard with the "everything must happen via the center console" interface strategy. From an aesthetic perspective, it is Very Pretty, but it's kind of hard to accept that the way to open a glove compartment is a button, on a screen, two feet and some menus away from the compartment itself.
  - tills13 7y ago
    I definitely agree there. Dials and knobs are great because you can operate them without looking away from the road. However, I can see why they went down that path - if everything is done via the screen, they can add features via an OTA update.
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    It’s not primarily an aesthetic choice it is about part count more than anything. The LCD is 10 parts and a lot of wiring. The same stuff in a trad vehicle is a thousand parts and all the same wiring and probably a display or two. It’s just more expensive to make.
    - asteli 7y ago
      That doesn't hold up, at least with my example. The glovebox latch on most vehicles is a couple of bits of stamped metal and a spring. By making it electrically actuated, Telsa necessitated adding a branch to the wiring harness, along with extra crimps and connectors to keep track of, and an actuator. This is all in addition to the latch mechanicals that would have been present already.
      - erikpukinskis 7y ago
jdietrich 7y ago
Hot take: Tesla isn't actually a car company, it's a battery company. The Model S and Model 3 are functionally equivalent to Google Nexus devices - their purpose isn't particularly to sell a lot of units, but to provide a proof-of-concept for other companies to emulate. Tesla Motors fails if it dies, but it succeeds if it's killed by other EV companies. Selling cars to consumers is fundamentally less scalable than selling batteries to car manufacturers; you don't need dealerships, you don't need marketing, you don't need a complex supply chain for thousands of complex parts, you just need a couple of huge factories and some proprietary chemistry.
- sjg007 7y ago
  Panasonic is the answer to your question. https://www.google.com/search?q=who+makes+tesla+batteries https://www.google.com/search?q=who+makes+tesla+batteries
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    They didn’t ask a question.
- woodgrainz 7y ago
  Doesn't Panasonic make the batteries for Tesla?
  - martinald 7y ago
    Correct, and the Tesla Panasonic relationship is really on the rocks (iirc at one point Tesla owed panasonic over US$1billion in payments)
  - jdietrich 7y ago
    Tesla own the Gigafactory but lease the manufacturing equipment from Panasonic on a per-cell-manufactured basis. Tesla have just bought Maxwell, a lithium cell and supercapacitor IP company. Panasonic effectively make the cells (through quite a convoluted financial arrangement with Tesla), but Tesla make the batteries, which is a crucial distinction. An EV battery pack is inordinately more complex than a bundle of li-ion cells. https://electrek.co/2019/05/16/tesla-completes-maxwell-acquisition-battery-technology/ https://electrek.co/2019/05/16/tesla-completes-maxwell-acqui...

71 points by gibolt 7y ago

> Lucid Motors has kind of spun out of Tesla. It was started by a former Tesla board member and executive and it is led by Peter Rawlinson, the former chief engineer of the Tesla Model S. > Several other Tesla engineers and executives have also joined the startup and they are now also adding Hochholdinger to the team

agumonkey 7y ago
will this be a fairchild / intel moment ?
FireBeyond 7y ago
Is it really a spin off? Or more of an abandoning of ship?
ricardobeat 7y ago
What’s with this recent trend of simply posting quotes from the article in HN? Haven’t we all just finished reading those exact words, what value is this adding to the discussion?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Shorn 7y ago
  I rarely read the article, this comment surfaced an interesting aspect.
- camjohnson26 7y ago
  Maybe people have never heard of Lucid motors and want to know if it’s worth clicking.

atonse 7y ago

Is this sort of how they're trying to make a Tesla without Musk? By just leaving one by one and recreating the company without Musk, instead of just firing him? Really curious as to what the motivations might be here for all these people to leave (apart from the monetary benefits of joining another "Tesla" even earlier).

gibolt 7y ago
Most Tesla employees want to work on EVs, and it is a natural inclination for employees to move towards newer, shinier projects and want to switch company at some point. Lucid probably makes that choice super easy, since you'll be working with familiar faces. The early employees are likely the best to create a new electric car company, since they were the foundation of the current industry leader.
- atonse 7y ago
  I agree – I'm just wondering what the draw is. Maybe Tesla has gone into maintenance mode with refinements to their cars, and these folks are fundamentally builders and want to build something radically different. But when you look at it, they're building another Model S.
  - rhacker 7y ago
    From my point of view that means it's either pay or people issues. Personally I don't like starting over on APIs etc.. if you ever switched from a company that has a foundation to one that doesn't you end up with employees that say things like - oh darn we actually had a really good X at company Y. At least they can start over and build with fewer mistakes, but hitting the same tasks again is often annoying.
    - gibolt 7y ago
      I'd guess it is the opposite. Some people like startups because nothing is defined, everything is new. Having the option to build something you liked is better than being forced to use what is already used 'because it exists'.

zyang 7y ago

This is reminiscent of Shockley and the traitorous eight.

bdcravens 7y ago

Interesting name: "Lucid" This implies clarity. I personally think Tesla vehicles may fit the needs of a small percentage of the population (kind of like the new Mac Pro), but are overkill for everyone else, and the excitement in EV's is changing the world for future generations. This requires a car you can sell to everyone, not just those who would drop $80k on a car (or even $40k). I believe the core of what Tesla could be, a great EV, is obfuscated by things like AutoPilot. Interestingly enough, that's where most of the issues and headlines are as well.

myrandomcomment 7y ago
Except Lucid's first car is an over top luxury car that even has an option for exec stye seats in the back for those that have a driver. Their car is a Mac Pro and Tesla is just the 5K iMac. https://lucidmotors.com https://lucidmotors.com
- throwayEngineer 7y ago
  I work in automotive and I see these small volume companies as a total waste for rich people. Quality in a low volume car is terrible. Things are not tested, so they fail often, and the cars are repaired. I cannot imagine the best engineers building a quality, low volume car. Note that car quality, and features are different things. But even with that, a mainstream luxury brand will destroy these small volume counterparts.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  Disappointing.
- reneherse 7y ago
  Having taken a first look at images of the car on their site, I'll say one thing: Lucid has managed a much higher level of aesthetic refinement in their design than Tesla. I'm a huge fan of Tesla overall, and especially their engineering. Unfortunately, despite the pedigree of their design team, I find the aesthetics wanting. In comparison, the Lucid "Air" (as their model is known), seems to rival the best German manufacturers for aesthetics. It has the crispness and ease of a design from a mature luxury car company. So hats off to that achievement, whatever their market or price point. Tesla's sheet metal and interiors are somewhat clumsy in comparison. (It's never a good sign when your car looks best in the curve-hiding color black.)

londons_explore 7y ago

Lucid Motors looks like an almost exact clone of Tesla... The strategy, the design, etc. I wonder how they expect to be better?

Ididntdothis 7y ago
There often is an advantage to being a second mover. I am sure Tesla made a lot of expensive mistakes that a newcomer can avoid and save a lot of money. The same would apply for SpaceX. They could study a lot of the successful and unsuccessful things other rocket makers had made and then do better.
- ancorevard 7y ago
  Being the last mover is preferable. To illustrate the point: Google search, the last search engine. Facebook, the last social network.
  - sah2ed 7y ago
    This is only true in certain industries. The examples you cite are Internet companies. Internet companies are peculiar because they exploit the economies of scale of the Internet to primarily offer services, not goods (read physical products). If being last mover offered an advantage to players selling goods, then Windows Phone ought to have trounced Apple iPhone and Google Android since they were a late entrant in the smartphone movement when the paradigm shifted from physical keyboards to touchscreens.
rasz 7y ago
Its easy to look good when you dont actually make anything. This is a 12 year old "startup" without a product.

londons_explore 7y ago

Interesting the lucid motors website is available in English and Chinese. I wonder if they're hoping for China to be their main market, or to attract investment from there?

Meandering 7y ago
There has been Chinese money backing lucid motors since their early stages. I've seen several articles over the past few years. Seemingly, they are working with a Chinese bus company as well... https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/21/18235019/lucid-motors-electric-suv-ev-saudi-arabia https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/21/18235019/lucid-motors-ele... https://electrek.co/guides/lucid-motors/ https://electrek.co/guides/lucid-motors/

tills13 7y ago

The thing I like the most about Tesla is the cars look futuristic without going _too far_. I feel like every other luxury EV company just goes off the deep end. The 3 and the modern S are the perfect design imo.

asteli 7y ago
I think they went overboard with the "everything must happen via the center console" interface strategy. From an aesthetic perspective, it is Very Pretty, but it's kind of hard to accept that the way to open a glove compartment is a button, on a screen, two feet and some menus away from the compartment itself.
- tills13 7y ago
  I definitely agree there. Dials and knobs are great because you can operate them without looking away from the road. However, I can see why they went down that path - if everything is done via the screen, they can add features via an OTA update.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  It’s not primarily an aesthetic choice it is about part count more than anything. The LCD is 10 parts and a lot of wiring. The same stuff in a trad vehicle is a thousand parts and all the same wiring and probably a display or two. It’s just more expensive to make.
  - asteli 7y ago
    That doesn't hold up, at least with my example. The glovebox latch on most vehicles is a couple of bits of stamped metal and a spring. By making it electrically actuated, Telsa necessitated adding a branch to the wiring harness, along with extra crimps and connectors to keep track of, and an actuator. This is all in addition to the latch mechanicals that would have been present already.
    - erikpukinskis 7y ago

jdietrich 7y ago

Hot take: Tesla isn't actually a car company, it's a battery company. The Model S and Model 3 are functionally equivalent to Google Nexus devices - their purpose isn't particularly to sell a lot of units, but to provide a proof-of-concept for other companies to emulate. Tesla Motors fails if it dies, but it succeeds if it's killed by other EV companies. Selling cars to consumers is fundamentally less scalable than selling batteries to car manufacturers; you don't need dealerships, you don't need marketing, you don't need a complex supply chain for thousands of complex parts, you just need a couple of huge factories and some proprietary chemistry.

sjg007 7y ago
Panasonic is the answer to your question. https://www.google.com/search?q=who+makes+tesla+batteries https://www.google.com/search?q=who+makes+tesla+batteries
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  They didn’t ask a question.
woodgrainz 7y ago
Doesn't Panasonic make the batteries for Tesla?
- martinald 7y ago
  Correct, and the Tesla Panasonic relationship is really on the rocks (iirc at one point Tesla owed panasonic over US$1billion in payments)
- jdietrich 7y ago
  Tesla own the Gigafactory but lease the manufacturing equipment from Panasonic on a per-cell-manufactured basis. Tesla have just bought Maxwell, a lithium cell and supercapacitor IP company. Panasonic effectively make the cells (through quite a convoluted financial arrangement with Tesla), but Tesla make the batteries, which is a crucial distinction. An EV battery pack is inordinately more complex than a bundle of li-ion cells. https://electrek.co/2019/05/16/tesla-completes-maxwell-acquisition-battery-technology/ https://electrek.co/2019/05/16/tesla-completes-maxwell-acqui...