‘This Is The Wrong Product’: EV Exec Admits Electric Pickup Trucks Don’t Make Money

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.”

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.

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