This week, we speak with Peter Rawlinson, chief executive officer, chief technology officer and member of the board of directors at Lucid Motors Inc., where he is responsible for the company’s strategy and execution, as well as the creation and delivery of all Lucid products. Before Lucid, Peter was vice president of vehicle engineering at Tesla Inc. and chief engineer of the Model S. He was previously chief engineer of advanced engineering at Lotus Cars and principal engineer at Jaguar Cars.
The Tesla Model S was brought into being from a “clean sheet” by Rawlinson. We discuss the many ways this EV was the biggest break from Internal Combustion Engine vehicle history, filled with technological innovations. He credits Elon Musk with forcing the entire Automotive Industry towards electrification.
Rawlinson takes the mantle of technological leadership, stating that Lucid has definitively taken the lead across every EV technology other than autonomous driving (“we prefer to be a fast-follower” there). In every other technology, that make up EVs — Efficiency, range, internal space, power, top speed, capacity, recharge speed, voltage architecture, over-the-air updates, self-diagnosis, and repair — were all areas that Tesla formerly led, but have been surpassed by Lucid.
He politely observes that no one can run four companies at once — even HSteve Jobs only ran Apple and was hands off at Pixar — and it is beginning to show. He suggests Musk is distracted by Twitter, SpaceX, X-AI — they all vie for his attention to the overall detriment of Tesla.
A transcript of our conversation is available here Tuesday.
You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Eva Shang, CEO/co-founder of Legalist. The firm specializes in litigation finance, which is non-correlated with equities. She leads the company’s 50-person team of engineers, attorneys, and analysts, and is a member of the firm’s valuation & investment committees and board of directors. Before co-founding Legalist at 20, Eva studied economics at Harvard College.
