The CEO of an electric vehicle (EV) company does not believe that electric pickup trucks are currently a viable product, he told Axios in an interview.
Peter Rawlinson, CEO of luxury EV producer Lucid Motors, told Axios that he believes internal combustion engines, and not batteries, are the only realistic option for pickup trucks. Other major auto manufacturers — such as Ford, Chevrolet and Tesla — are selling electric pickups, but Rawlinson says that they are currently too inefficient to make sense for most consumers.
“I believe that the only viable solution for an affordable, usable pickup truck today is internal combustion,” Rawlinson told Axios. “This is the wrong product, and so we’re seeing that companies are not making a viable profit by trying to make an electric pickup truck.”
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Specifically, Rawlinson is skeptical of EV pickups, at least for now, because the mileage per kilowatt hour of batteries is not high enough for any vehicle that has a large payload, according to Axios. This means that the costs of batteries for electric pickup trucks are higher than for other types of EVs, making them more expensive and less appealing for consumers.
Lucid — which has received billions of dollars in investment from the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund since 2018 —is not in the electric pickup truck market, per Axios. The startup is still running at a loss as it attempts to scale up its operations.
The Biden administration has spent billions of dollars and promulgated several stringent regulations to advance EV manufacturing and adoption over the course of the next decade. However, the American EV market has struggled to take off, with consumer demand not growing as quickly as anticipated and major manufacturers losing billions of dollars on their electric product lines.
However, Rawlinson does not believe that cooler EV demand poses a major long-term problem for his company.
“If you look at us, I could say, ‘What slowdown?” Rawlinson told Axios, referencing the fact that Lucid’s deliveries have increased for each of the past four quarters. “You do the math and my vision, my dream — that we could get to a million cars a year by the early 2030s — is totally realistic.”
Lucid did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
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