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By Cromwell Schubarth  – TechFlash Editor, Silicon Valley Business Journal 7 hours ago
Lucid Motors Inc. can’t road test the small fleet of prototypes of electric vehicles it has assembled in the Bay Area, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic.
But it posted a blog and video on Monday that tease the Lucid Air vehicles that it plans to challenge Tesla Motors Inc. with.
“Normally, these vehicles would be racking up long-distance miles on the highway or circling a test track as we refine and validate the Lucid Air’s advanced engineering and game-changing performance,” the company said in its blog.
Some of the tests it did before the pandemic included winter testing in the frozen northern reaches of Minnesota and a shuttle trip between San Francisco and Los Angeles on a single charge.
Unlike Tesla, which makes its vehicles at a factory in Fremont and another in China, Lucid has no plans to do its factory production in the Bay Area. It is building a massive factory in Arizona to handle that.
Lucid employs more than 1,000 and is headed by former Tesla Inc. chief engineer Peter Rawlinson. The company’s principal investor is Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which committed to providing $1 billion of capital in September 2018.
It had planned to unveil its car in last month at the New York Auto Show, but that was postponed until late August amid travel bans and a mounting COVID-19 outbreak.The 2020 Detroit Auto Show, which was planned for early June, was canceled outright after the Federal Emergency Management Administration designated its host venue, the TCF Center, a coronavirus field hospital, as well.
Rawlinson has said that the car’s formal unveiling will come when large scale auto shows are allowed again.
Meanwhile, it is trying to keep potential buyers interested with peeks like it offered on Monday.