so we just spent the day here at lucid motors new factory at casa grande arizona it is here
in the background this is phase one this is pretty exciting for lucid because they've been
at this for a while they built this factory a couple of months ago we were supposed to have
this tour in april here we are now in september but we had quite a day we got some news we got
to drive the car which is probably the biggest thing i've been waiting for so on this episode
tip of davinci we're going to talk about lucid motors and their progress here in 2021
the lucid air right there behind us and where they are and more so stay tuned
the lucid motor story has been an interesting one we've talked about them in the past
i think they get a fair bit of love and hate in the eevee community and i've never fully
understood why i've always said we need to have a lot more evs when pepsi came along it wasn't like
coke thought that there goes half their market share it was the opposite the total addressable
market grew the number of people who drink soft drinks grew this is the same thing if tesla's
making cars and rivers making trucks and lucid's making cars the market of electric vehicles grows
so this is a company i have been cheering for from the very beginning and i continue to do so so here
is their factory in castle grande arizona the first thing i'll tell you this is phase one one
of the things you got to remember is it's really difficult building cars to build a new automotive
company and a plant is nearly impossible there's so much capital expansion that goes into building
one of these things so the first clever thing that lucid has done is they've kind of staggered their
spend if you will with this factory so this is phase one it's about a million square feet
in floor space phase two takes that up to three or four million square feet so substantially bigger
plant at that point they've been making almost a hundred thousand cars a year about ninety thousand
a year and then their eventual goal is almost 400 000 cars a year but to get there you got to
be clever so what they've decided and i didn't really actually know this and i was talking to
my friends in the industry one of the really central things to a plant is the paint shop
so the paint shop is usually one of the biggest bottlenecks and the person that told me that is
actually right here kyle do you want to take them real quick you were just telling me about the
paint shop and their strategy about it yes could you expand on that yes uh a year and a half ago
i was speeding with p speaking with peter hawk holding her about the paint shop and uh this is
sort of the genesis of the factory this is how it started and they built the whole facility around
it it's the hardest part the most complicated part the most expensive machinery and the like
the most permanent machinery that sticks around so my understanding was you start with the paint
shop and then everything else around it can be expanded it's sort of like the keystone uh
portion of the factory so one of the things they mentioned which i thought was pretty clever is
they didn't build a small paint shop thinking we'll expand it later they built a massive paint
shop the one they want and because they're not building a hundred thousand or four thousand cars
yet they're using the lower floor for general assembly but as soon as they are building 100
000 cars or 400 000 cars well general assembly moved into its own little part of the warehouse
and the paint shop would be fully a paint shop so again seems pretty clever i think you got to be
scrappy if you're building a new car company it's nearly impossible a lot of the cars you drive are
made by legacy makers have been doing this for a long time there aren't very many of these so
i i just feel like there's a strappiness to it they've they've kind of figured it out they've
spent the money in the right places yeah that's my impression at least i'm pretty impressed i
mean i think one of the most important things when you tore a factory is like oh my god no
cars are blowing up like it's not exciting right you're going around things are working orderly
and like they have a really good process and to me that means things are working properly i was
impressed with the overall factory i think there's a lot of room for expansion of course they have a
lot of room around for it and yeah really excited to see where they go in the future for sure so a
couple things they mentioned this is the first new green field factory in north america that
means like tesla for example bought a previously used nume plant in fremont this is brand new built
and when you walk around in there you can tell we weren't really allowed to film a lot of what
was going on but everything's robotic it's really highly automated clean modern and more expensive
i'm sure but actually buying an old factory and re-tooling it is a little bit expensive as well
so the factory is really cool they're building the first cars that will be going to customers shortly
so i think as we were driving around driving around as we were walking around the factory we
saw cars and final assembly getting put together these are the not the first but the first of many
of the cars coming off the line and these are the cars that are going to customers so it has been a
long road for lucid they first unveiled this car about five years ago they went through their own
production hells and all the various stages that any car company has to go through but at
the end of the day i think we're close peter said that they are expecting deliveries to customers
in october so like a month from now and uh i think all that's really good i had a chance to
drive the car as well so one of the things i always look at with these the cars is the
accelerator pedal and how well it's mapped to your foot um cars like the ford monkey i think
they were just very rough and like it wasn't like a linear travel it felt like there was
just a little bit of like kinks to work out this feels really good you can kind of just
modulate your foot a millimeter or two you can see that it swings back and forth between
charging and regen and when it switches between the two it's also really smooth
the two takeaways from this entire event for me are about they're they're serious hardcore
engineering shops they've built a car that is crazy efficient 520 miles with a 112 kilowatt
battery pack computes like four point almost 4.7 miles per kilowatt hour that is tops and that's
really impressive considering how big this car is speaking of how big the car is on the outside
it's like a mercedes e-class like mid-size right luxury car but on the inside it feels like an
s-class it's massive i gotta tell you i'm pretty blown away by this thing there's a general high
quality finish everything kind of feels premium and nice and the leg room is massive look at the
the greenhouse on on top here huge sunroof a lot of kind of typical stuff we're used to with evs
and all that is is still here i think the real big takeaway for me is just how much leg room i
have my leg room when i was inside is huge the person that was driving with us from lucille to
six foot two had his seat back way far back and i felt like i was driving in like a limousine it was
massive and they are able to do that because of their engineering and design around their motors
their motor weighs about 74 kilograms and can produce 640 670 horsepower that means their two
motors deliver on the 111 horsepower that the dream edition performance is rated to produce
and all of that is possible because they stick everything out as far as they can the motor and
the battery assembly is low slung and out of the way the front trunk is massive the front and the
rear leg room is huge we're looking at it from the outside it feels like a pretty good sized car
but then yeah here comes one now but then when you get inside of it it's substantially bigger feeling
but the front trunk is built with a soft plastic that allows them to stick it into the cavity
and then expand on it because i guess what they were saying is there's actually more room inside
than there is loading room from the top so they used a soft plastic when they when they molded
it that way they could stick it through the opening and then expand on it for the maximum
amount of space they've kind of thought about this and this is where i'm really excited about
startups as opposed to legacy makers i think when you have a clean sheet of paper you don't start
with any old ways or old ideas you start fresh and there's quite a few areas where this car for me
kind of shines in that way the driving feel and the driving performance was
unbelievable it is breakneck fast it felt like the fastest of cars i've ever been in i haven't been
in a tesla plaid but i'm sure it's kind of similar to that it is so fast the pedal mapping which is
something i always gripe about i had an issue with the ford machi for example having really
poor pedal mapping the first 10 this car was like my tesla model 3 which was just near perfection
you could really dial in the power just by modulating your left foot or your right foot
and uh and get exactly how much power you want out of it the regenerative braking is also similarly
predictable it comes and goes very linearly and bravo to the team for the for the work
they've done kyle who was just on on camera he mentioned he drove this car two months ago in
monterey and he said that the throttle mapping wasn't quite perfect the the mapping of the pedals
he felt needed some work and since then to now in two months the team has taken the feedback and
evolved on it a lot of this stuff is software and they're making great progress so if you're excited
about electric vehicles this is one of those cars that has got me excited tesla's proven that it can
be done once when rivian and lucid do it now it becomes a pattern and if you like electrification
that's the whole point so bravo lucid and thank you for inviting us out here
i'll have to email somebody there and see if i can get a longer day with it to drive it a little more
and put it through its paces but this thing is a monster it is an absolute pleasure to drive
and it's not like a track car i'd say it's more of a luxury performance car it's big it's roomy
and it's dialed in for comfort but it is a more than capable performance machine thank you so
much for watching guys that's my report here at lucid uh if you were excited about lucid before
i think everything i've seen here today should make you more excited and if you were skeptical
about lucid which i kind of understand that too i got to tell you they're pretty close to
delivering cars to customers so well done to the team here i think there's a lot of excitement a
lot of long nights and a huge congratulations is probably in order so thank you so much for
all of you for joining and uh subscribe and hit that like button and stay tuned we'll cover more
stuff as we can i'm ricky with two davinci and just remember the future is gonna be awesome