The CEO of luxury electric car maker Lucid Motors has expressed some doubts about self-driving cars, noting that he doesn’t think they will be solved until the next decade.
In a recent interview with Semaphore, Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson said he doesn’t expect autonomous vehicles to appear “until the 2030s,” adding that he believes people “grossly underestimate” the difficulty of achieving autonomy. These statements came in response to the interviewer asking whether people have underestimated how difficult it will be to get through the last 5 percent of the sheer chaos involved in solving the self-driving problem.
“It’s like refining gold to 99.9999 percent – the first few 90s are easy, but it gets to the last 0.01 percent. I can’t see that actually happening until the 2030s,” Rawlinson said.
The interview also touched on several other topics, including Lucid’s powertrain technology, and the fact that Rawlinson says he and management are moving toward focusing more on autonomous driving and the user interface. He also discussed Lucid’s investments from the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), along with briefly talking about Elon Musk’s politics.
This news comes on the heels of Tesla’s recent unveiling of its Cybercab and Robovan self-driving vehicles, and as some companies, like Waymo, have already been piloting early self-driving ride-hailing services in select geographies. Tesla has argued that its Full Self-Driving (FSD) will be easier to scale than services like Waymo, since it doesn’t use any mapping, but instead relies on training its neural network with millions of real-life videos. Driving scenarios over time.
Rawlinson has regularly touted the Lucid Air’s highly efficient battery technology, while at the same time claiming that Tesla and other automakers have fallen behind or fallen behind. In August, Rawlinson said Lucid’s electric vehicles had “taken the mantle from Tesla,” adding that the company had “become dispersed.”
Obviously we have the best technology in the world. We’ve now taken the mantle from Tesla. We have the best technology, and that’s widely recognized… We’ve lived up to the mission without a doubt. I mean everyone is striving for “how far can you go with such little battery space?”
We are way ahead of where Tesla is. We have taken up that mantle. When I was at Tesla, Tesla was the technology leader. They became distracted, and we took this place.
Lucid is teaming up with the hotel giant to offer free cars for guests to use
What are your thoughts? Let me know at zach@teslarati.com, find me on X at @zacharyvisconti, or send us tips at tips@teslarati.com.
