Lucid CEO doesn’t think self-driving will be realized until next decade

The CEO of luxury electric vehicle (EV) maker Lucid Motors has shared some skepticism around self-driving vehicles, noting that he doesn’t believe they’ll be solved until next decade.

In a recent interview with Semafor, Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson has said that he doesn’t expect self-driving vehicles to happen “till the 2030s,” adding that he thinks people are “significantly underestimating” the difficulty in reaching autonomy. The statements came in response to the interviewer asking if people had been minimizing how hard it would be to surpass the final 5 percent of utter chaos involved in solving self-driving.

“It’s like refining gold to 99.9999 percent — the first few nines are easy, but it’s that last 0.01 percent. I can’t see it really happening till the 2030s,” Rawlinson said.

The interview also touched on several other topics, including Lucid’s powertrain technology, and the fact that Rawlinson says he and management are pivoting toward a greater focus on autonomous driving and the user interface. He also discussed Lucid’s investments from the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund (PIF), along with talking briefly about Elon Musk’s politics.

The news follows Tesla’s recent unveiling of the Cybercab and Robovan autonomous vehicles, and as some companies, such as Waymo, have already been piloting early self-driving ride-hailing services in geofenced areas. Tesla has argued that its Full Self-Driving (FSD) will be easier to scale than services like Waymo, given that it doesn’t utilize any mapping, but rather drives based on the training of its neural network with millions of videos from real-time driving scenarios.

Rawlinson has regularly touted the highly-efficient Lucid Air battery technology, while simultaneously claiming Tesla and other automakers are or have fallen behind. In August, Rawlinson said that Lucid’s EVs had “taken the mantle from Tesla,” adding that the company has “become distracted.”

Clearly, we have the best technology in the world. We’ve now taken the mantle from Tesla. We have the best tech, and that has been widely recognized…We’ve taken the mantle without a doubt. I mean, everyone is striving for “how far can you go with how little battery space?”

We are considerably ahead of where Tesla is. We’ve taken that mantle. When I was at Tesla, Tesla was the tech leader. They’ve become distracted, and we have taken that place.

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