Can Lucid succeed where others have failed?

LOS ANGELES -- While the annual auto show pulsed in the Los Angeles Convention Center last month, Lucid Motors' camouflaged prototype electric luxury sedan sat in a drab parking garage next door, lest it call undue attention to itself.

It's not that Lucid -- formerly known as Atieva -- doesn't want publicity. Last week, the Chinese-backed startup announced plans for a $700 million factory in Casa Grande, Ariz., south of Phoenix. Next week, it plans a big splash near Silicon Valley to finally reveal the car's design and what it calls an innovative business model.

But the car and the company are entering an automotive landscape that is littered with startups whose promises to revolutionize mobility tend to evaporate before the ink is dry on their press releases. Every time that happens, it makes it harder for the next company to assert itself as the real thing, a fact that Lucid and its executives are keenly aware of.

"We don't want to talk about it, we want to show it," Peter Rawlinson, Lucid's chief technology officer, told Automotive News as he circled the car. "We haven't got a show car; our competitors have show cars. This is the real deal."

Sure enough, Lucid's prototype sedan feels like a viable product, primarily because it exists at all, but also because it isn't some outlandish supercar concept that looks like it's engineered purely to gin up headlines. This suggests that Lucid is closing in on that elusive goal for automotive startups: actually building and selling a real car.

Getting to that point will be a daunting task. The 330-person company needs to rise above the growing attention that mainstream luxury automakers are now lavishing on electric vehicles (think Jaguar's I-Pace, Porsche's Mission E, Mercedes-Benz' Generation EQ and Audi's e-tron). It must also avoid being dismissed as just another in a long line of overhyped EV startups that have gone quiet or kaput.

That could be tough, not least because -- despite an executive team stocked with veterans from BMW, Mazda, Ford and Tesla -- Lucid has a vacancy at one key post: CEO.

While Lucid says it hopes to announce one soon, the vacancy raises questions about who's in charge and how much sway investors will have over the business. It also invites an unflattering comparison to Faraday Future, another California-based, Chinese-backed EV startup that has operated without a formal CEO for more than a year.

Faraday landed at the Consumer Electronics Show last January with a splashy 1,000-hp concept racecar, but few clues about its business model, executive structure, funding sources or the promised production vehicle itself. This fall, many of Faraday's prospects seemed to go up in smoke amid executive departures and a cash crunch that led to a work stoppage on its massive plant in North Las Vegas.

As it happens, the two companies are connected through Chinese Internet billionaire Jia Yueting. He provided the bulk of Faraday's funding, and his company LeEco -- itself facing a cash crunch -- is one of Lucid's four key shareholders.

Perhaps stung by the recent troubles of Faraday, Yueting and LeEco, Rawlinson is keen to make it clear that Lucid's finances are sound. LeEco's investment has already been made; the money is sitting in Lucid's bank account and isn't affected by LeEco's recent troubles.

"Lucid is an independent, American company. It's a California brand," Rawlinson said. "We're not majority-owned by anyone. And we're not dependent upon a current investor for funding."

Lucid, of Menlo Park, Calif., was founded as Atieva in 2007 by Bernard Tse, a former Tesla vice president and board member, along with Sam Weng and Sheaupyng Lin. Of the three, only Weng remains, serving as COO.

Initially the company focused on developing battery packs for a variety of vehicles -- including buses -- in China. In 2014, it pivoted to the idea of building its own car and raised a reported $100 million in venture capital to do so. (Rawlinson joined just before this in 2013, lured away from Tesla where he was the chief engineer for the Model S.) 

In addition to LeEco -- which also holds a seat on Lucid's board -- the company is funded by Venrock, the venture-capital arm of the Rockefeller family; Japanese conglomerate Mitsui; and Chinese venture-capital firm Tsing.

Looking to demonstrate that its investors' money is well-spent, Lucid brought a very early prototype of its first production car to Los Angeles for a few quick demos with journalists during the auto show. Despite the handmade test car's rough nature and multimillion-dollar price tag, Lucid was willing to drive it around a city that regards fender benders as benignly as a stubbed toe.

"This is an alpha prototype," Rawlinson said in the parking garage. "It's quite ballsy to drive a car on the streets and show it."

Lucid will reveal the real thing to the public on Dec. 14 at its prototype shop in Fremont, Calif. Roughly the size of a Mercedes-Benz E class on the outside, the sedan promises the interior space and amenities of an S class or even a Maybach.

Lucid's plans are aggressive. It says it will invest $700 million in the Arizona site by 2022, by which time the plant will employ more than 2,000 people. It plans to break ground in the first half of 2017, start production of its vehicle in late 2018 and have the first copies -- sold directly to consumers, as Tesla does -- on the road by early 2019. That gives it roughly 18 months to finish construction, tool it up, staff it, train the employees and start production.

While nearly all the mainstream luxury brands are homing in on the EV market, Lucid still sees white space in the ultra-premium sedan segment -- that is, north of $100,000. Eventually it will offer higher-volume versions of the sedan with fewer exotic amenities.

When the sedan arrives, it will carry with it an interesting, if ambitious, approach to autonomous driving. Every car sold will come with Level 4 autonomous capability built in and ready to turn on pending regulatory approval. Much of that capability hinges on the use of solid-state lidar as a standard feature, which is where Lucid's plans get dicey.

For one thing, solid-state lidar is in its infancy. Any supplier that Lucid would use will be hard-pressed by 2018 to have a system that works as well as conventional lidar, which remains very expensive and physically hard to package on consumer vehicles (it's those large puck-shaped sensors mounted to the roof of Google's or Uber's test cars).

Then there's the issue of the data.

Lucid plans to offset the cost of including lidar as a standard feature by selling the mapping data gathered by the sensors to third parties. The automaker sees such robust demand for this "big data" that its value could become the backbone of Lucid's overall business model.

This assumes that there will be vibrant demand for such data from parties that aren't gathering it themselves. It also assumes that customers are willing to have their data shared -- albeit anonymously. Lucid hasn't decided yet whether to allow drivers to opt out from sharing this but says the smaller, individualized kinds of data that could identify a customer won't be sold.

"I don't see a situation where discrete use patterns from individual cars could be exploited in that sense," Rawlinson said. "No individuals will be able to be distinguished."