Lucid CEO Says What I Said A Decade Ago — Give Us Less Range! – CleanTechnica

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Last Updated on: 14th February 2025, 12:18 pm

Okay, “give us less range!” is not what Lucid Motors CEO Peter Rawlinson said. However, as you’ve probably seen by now, he did state that he thinks future electric cars can have just 180 miles of range, which goes against conventional wisdom. I said some quite similar things a decade ago (man, time flies…). I was arguing against Elon Musk’s claim that all electric cars need at least 200 miles of range. I saw that as an anti-EV talking point, harmful to EV adoption, and just blatantly incorrect. Here are some of my reasons for saying so back then, which still stand today:

First of all, the typical anti-EV claim is that people occasionally need or want to drive long distances (again, we are ignoring the small subset of people who drive hundreds of miles a day on a daily or weekly basis). This may be for vacations, weekend away trips, to visit friends or family in other towns or cities, etc. One reason that argument breaks down if used as a blanket statement against EVs like the LEAF or BMW i3 is that most (American) households have 2 or more cars. If you are going on vacation, for a weekend away, to visit family or friends, etc., there’s a very good chance you are going with your family and can take the longer-range vehicle if you are planning to drive a hundred miles or more and don’t have good charging options. Or, if one of the household members is staying home, you can very likely swap cars for the day/weekend.

How Much Do You Actually Drive?

In the next chart and graph, look and see what % of one-way trips are over 80 miles, or for that matter, what % is over 40 miles.

Of course, these are just individual trips. What if someone doesn’t have good charging options away from home and they are out all day? Here’s one more graph and a chart from Rob (more are in his article about the matter), showing total daily distances:

Nearly 80% of days, we don’t go more than 50 miles. Combining this point with the “# of cars in the household” point, I imagine that millions of households would be absolutely fine with a short-range electric car. If they realized the benefits of convenient home charging, instant torque, less maintenance, lower operational costs, etc., buying an EV would be a no-brainer.

If you’ve got two or three cars in the household, and one car is only really used around town or around the region, why would it make sense to spend thousands of dollars more for a battery that has far more capacity than you need rather than buy an electric car with 150 miles of range? You’re not going to run out of electricity. You’re not going to struggle to charge it if you have a place to plug in at home, work, or the grocery store. You don’t need 200+ miles of range, let alone 300+ miles of range, on a car that drives 15–40 miles a day.

That doesn’t mean no one needs 300+ miles of range! What we need is choice. The market benefits from choice. Consumers benefit from choice. And I still believe there could be more choice on the EV market, with some lower-cost options with less range. Heck, auto sellers, you can even just use a $20,000 150-mile EV that most people won’t end up buying in order to get people in the door considering their options! That would help an automaker/auto dealer sell more cars with more range.

Rawlinson is talking more about the future than the present, once EV charging outlets are all over the place, and I agree that will help out this case massively. However, even today, there are countless cars being driven fewer than 50 miles a day and never used for road trips that could be replaced with cheap, 150-mile electric cars. The market is broad, and we need broader EV options in order to satisfy more customers and maximize the potential of today’s tech.

Anyway, thanks to Rawlinson for making an important, helpful statement and opening up more perspectives on what’s possible, or even logical.



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