The electric car manufacturer from the United States, which is also predicted to be a strong competitor for Tesla, Lucid Motor, plans to start selling its cars in Europe.
The expansion effort was announced by Lucid via his official Twitter account. The announcement was made following the upload of photos of the new owners of the Lucid car which invited netizens to ask whether they were located in England.
“Expansion into the European market will start this year (2022). Look forward to information regarding special shipments to (Europe) countries,” Lucid wrote in his tweet, quoted Thursday (6/1).
Ringing in the New Year by welcoming new members to the #LucidOwnersClub. pic.twitter.com/1dXfXtpvk9
— Lucid Motors (@LucidMotors) January 4, 2022
Lucid’s first car was called the Lucid Air, an electric sedan model. In this line there is a flagship model called the Dream Edition, one unit of which is priced at US $ 169,000 or equivalent to Rp. 2.43 billion. In the electric car industry, this car dominates the mileage category on a single charge, which is about 520 miles or 836.8 kilometers.
Like Tesla, Lucid is also testing and developing autonomous driving technology that allows cars to “drive themselves” safely.
Autonomous Driving
The head of automotive consulting firm Accenture, Axel Schmidt said that many technology companies tend to underestimate the challenges that come with developing automated driving technology.
According to Schmidt, by 2030 around 60-70% of new electric cars will have Level 2 autonomous driving systems.
Quoted from Synopsys, there are 6 levels in the automatic driving system. The first is Level 0: No Driving Automation, or must be driven completely manually. Then Level 1: Driver Assistance, is the lowest level of an autonomous driving system where the car can’t run alone, but only provides steering and speed steering assistance.
Then there is Level 2: Partial Driving Automation, consisting of a more sophisticated autonomous driving technology called advanced driver assistance systems or ADAS, where the car can already run on its own, but the driver still has to be alert in his seat and can take over the wheel at any time.
Then Level 3: Conditional Driving Automation. At this level the car has the ability to detect the circumstances around the car and can go fast to overtake the car in front of it. However, the driver is expected to remain vigilant to take over the steering wheel later.
Level 4: High Driving Automation. This level is practically similar to Level 3. However, Level 4 has the ability to automatically intervene when a system error occurs. At this level, the car is claimed to not require human assistance.
Level 5: Full Driving Automation. As the name suggests, at this level the car is fully controlled by the system. In fact, at this level the car does not provide a steering wheel, gas pedal, and brake pedal. This car can be ordered to walk anywhere and the car owner can sit back and do nothing.
European Market
As of January 2020, Lucid has started taking online orders in 15 European countries for its flagship Lucid Air. Even so, Lucid has not announced when the cars will be sent to consumers.
Some of the European countries include Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Monaco, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK.
Lucid Motor was founded in 2007 by former Tesla CEO Peter Rawlinson. Officially on the stock exchange, Lucid Motor received a valuation of around US$ 24 billion.
Investors in Lucid expect the company to be able to produce around 20,000 cars by 2022 with a total revenue of $2.2 billion.
