New American car-making forces "sing bad words" about autonomous driving: Lucid CEO says it will not be realized before 2030

On October 25, Benzinga reported on Wednesday that Peter Rawlinson, CEO of Lucid, a new American car manufacturer, expressed some doubts about the development prospects of self-driving cars. He believes that some key obstacles can only be overcome in the next decade (IT Home Note: 2030-2040).

He said in an interview that self-driving cars are not expected to become common until "the 2030s" and believes that people have "seriously underestimated" the difficulty of fully realizing autonomous driving. "It's like refining pure gold to 99.9999% purity - the first few percentiles are relatively easy, but the last 0.01% is particularly tricky. I don't expect this to be possible until the 2030s."

Rawlinson has repeatedly emphasized the Lucid Air's efficient battery technology and said that Tesla and other automakers have been surpassed by it. In August this year, Rawlinson said that Lucid's electric vehicles have "taken over Tesla", and that Tesla is now distracted by other things. "We undoubtedly have the world's leading technology, have taken over Tesla's position, and our technical strength has been widely recognized... Today everyone is pursuing 'how to run farther with a smaller battery'."

The 2025 Lucid Air pure electric sedan launched by Lucid this year was rated as the "world's most efficient electric car" by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in July, with a range of 5 miles (about 8.05 kilometers) per kWh of electricity. Among them, the Lucid Air Grand Touring model has an EPA operating range of 512 miles (about 823.98 kilometers) and is priced from US$110,900 (currently about RMB 790,000).