Lucid Motors agrees to go public with $24B valuation

My best guess is that in 30 years, the majority of cars on the road are still going to be ICE. But in 100 years? Who knows, we might get a fantastic battery breakthrough or perhaps we'll be driving fusion powered cars :P

Any car is a symphony of parts with varying durability, and if anything an EV will have fewer parts. So I think for the traditional manufactures doing ICE & EV cars, we'll see the EVs last longer outside the battery. That's the nexus of the longevity worry and I'm interested in whether newer solid-state batteries for cars start to solve for overall lifespan?

Just from my perspective, owning an EV:

- cold weather performance: Yeah, range is decreased. You deal with it. I can still drive to my grandparents cabin with one fast charge that finishes before I've bought all the groceries I need for the stay. Day-to-day it's better than ICE. Never any problems starting the car, and you can pre-heat it, which is a huge plus.

- weight: Our EV is about 100kg heavier than the gasoline variant I think, but it's not designed from ground-up to be an EV. I think you can get 40-50kWh EVs without much weight penalty now. Not that added weight is a big problem for personal cars. Since the weight is so low, it's a benefit to roll resistance.

- range: Sure, this could always be better. But for a lot of people, once you get an EV, and get used to it, you start to flip your thinking from "I should buy one with the longest range I can afford" to "Dealing with charging isn't so bad after all, I should get an EV with the smallest range that's still practical, otherwise most of the battery is dead weight most of the time"

- longevity: "Can a modern EV be expected to work fine in 20 years? An ICE can." - OK, sure, it might still be running. But from my parents experience with 15+ year old cars it's not something I'm keen on dealing with. There are a lot of parts that starts to wear down around that time, and they had a lot of issues with expensive repairs that was barely worth it. The first Nissan Leafs are 10 years old now, and despite a bad battery architecture they're doing quite fine. If the batteries last that long, I think I'd rather have a 20 year EV than a 20 year ICE. The range might be crap, but it can still be useful as a second car for local errands, and it'll probably be much less likely to fail unexpectedly. You might also see third party affordable battery replacements be available in 5-10 years. If you replace the battery the car is essentially as good as new with regards to the drivetrain. Maybe even better than new, since batteries get better/cheaper over time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qPF11PmP8k

- "And no matter what everyone says, EVs are still kind of impractical": True-ish, but that depends a lot on infrastructure. Here in Norway it's really not much of a problem at all. Half the supermarkets and all the shopping malls around me have fast chargers. Even IKEA has a bunch of them. Every road-side McDonalds. I think most apartment complexes have set up for doing over-night charging, you just need to pay for the charging box and installation. Even with out-door parking. This has ramped up really quickly the last 5 years. You just need that critical mass of EVs, and some government support (which for the US should hopefully be better the next 4 years). Remember that most of the charging stations models and companies didn't even exist when Norway really started ramping up 5 years back. It's getting easier every year.

The technology is good enough IMO. It's mostly about marketing and infrastructure. Most people prefer EVs after getting used to them. There's a lot of small benefits people aren't aware of (such as scheduled pre-heating in winter)

I think the US has bigger challenges than the rest of the world for a bunch of reasons (inefficient government, long-distance driving at high speeds, suburban sprawl, a love for SUVs, etc.). But even there I think you can start to see EVs taking off within 5 years with a bit of a push.

Unless you're taking into account the opportunity cost, I would expect the cost of investing in an electric infrastructure to be lower once the kinks have been worked out by early adopters.

On top of having a brand new set of expertise to shop for, the traditional automakers also will have to modify their existing factories. They'll have to do that eventually, but there might be some massive cost associated with adapting factories to the wrong tech.

So I guess one could compare its post-debt estimated value to this new startup as a upper bound since the startup doesn’t have that debt.

But auto making requires lots of capital so avoiding debt will likely not be possible as the company grows. Although if they keep valuations they can just sell stock and avoid debt.

I don’t agree with the $24B valuation, I just think that they have at least a chance to sell real cars, unlike Nikola that had a bad strategy from the start.

The question is whether Lucid can deliver some unique experience that customers value, and if so, then they too will be forgiven for their own gaps.

Uber was losing between $1B and $5B a quarter when they IPO'd. In the last quarter of 2020, Uber lost close to $1B, and they're still valued at $108B, with no real long term plan for survivability. The way I see it, risks include legislative changes WRT driver status, bad press, self driving cars, a post pandemic world where more people own a car, and less people are in cities. And we're talking about a company that is primarily marketing and software, where the wind can change very quickly, and assets are mostly intangible and untransferable.

car manufacturing is much harder to get into, so having a factory and an almost-complete design is already a huge milestone. Obviously, they'll need to sell _some_ cars, but they could even make money if they were to sell cars at a loss, through carbon credits.

I'm inclined to agree with you that defending some sort of insider advantage is part of the reason, along with expensive regulations and avoiding manipulative, activist speculative behavior.