I think that's exactly the goal here? I expect this partnership to continue with the lower-priced midsize Lucid if the trial (albeit a relatively large trial) goes well with Gravity.
With the size and storage capacity of the Gravity I'm not sure they are trying to compete with UberX. I see this as more competition with the Uber Comfort or Uber Black services (I don't think Waymo has an equivalent to Uber's Comfort or Black services). If they want to compete with UberX then the Cosmos will be the platform that would be used (UberX doesn't get you a 7 seat vehicle).
Right. Tesla is already testing the CyberCab, and they have a decade headstart on Lucid and other EV startups on manufacturing at scale. Lucid cannot and should not compete in the small car/single rider segment of ridesharing, given the saturation.
Why not? Lucid is simply providing the car. Uber / Nuro are the customer. If Uber wants to buy 50,000 midsize vehicles from Lucid then they’d be stupid not to take up the offer.
Tesla is cheap on sensors (camera only) while Lucid and everyone else puts emphasis on redundancy and safety (camera, radar, lidar, sonar). Waymo has been operating a commercial robotaxi service for over 5 years with a full sensor suite and a stellar accident record.
This means they will be the only company with a luxury robotaxi offering. There are absolutely people willing to pay a premium for this.
I would!
Fun with math... Lucid is currently losing about $100K per car gross. That is not SG&A, just materials, labor, and the costs to just build a car. So, if they sold 50,000 cars, that would be a $5B loss for Lucid.
Not necessarily as much in gross costs. Volume definitely smooths out net costs. In Lucid's case it is too much labor per unit and too much materials per unit. Volume will help some, but they are just spending too much to build a single car. They recently shut down a third shift to reduce labor costs, but they will have to improve labor efficiency to build the same volume of cars with less shift time. I do not think they have solved their supply chain and materials issues yet.
Yes, my wife being one of them. If you have four people going to the airport you summon one of these (or perhaps to dinner). UberX doesn't cut it easily if there are four people.
I bet this market is tiny. Fine if you want to go after a tiny market but be realistic about how many people are going to pay $100 for a 15 minute ride to the airport because the interior is nicer when there are options do it for $20. Uber Black already exists but way more people pick UberX or Comfort because of the cost.
Right, my point is they'll be able to carve out premium demand for themselves while they scale and work towards release of cheaper robotoaxi options. The market is small, but their fleet will also be small for the first couple of years.
Fair enough, if it's just buying Lucid vehicles at wholesale then that makes sense. In my mind I was thinking of a deeper partnership where Lucid shares in some of the costs/profits and the saturated market still makes me concerned.
I was talking mostly on the scale of manufacturing and the costs there. Waymos w/ the modified Jaguar i-Paces are tremendously expensive, and my mind goes to the bottleneck of getting enough vehicles on the road. Despite all the sensational headlines whenever a self-driving vehicle (I'm including Teslas, Waymos, even lesser variants like GM's SuperCruise) sneezes, I think they're already much safer than human drivers on average.
This is a naive take. It does not cost Lucid that much to build a vehicle. The 'loss of $X per vehicle' argument has been bandied about for years now. It's a dumb argument because Lucid is spending billions building out their infrastructure, so of course they're in the negative. I'm positive they're making some money per vehicle sold, but the capital expenditures far outweigh the sale profits. People really need to stop using that clickbait argument.
Saturation? There's like 2-3 companies running a few dozen vehicles in what, 4-5 cities?
