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Electric-vehicle company Lucid Group last week announced a new midsize-vehicle platform that will include three models (including two SUVs called Cosmos and Earth), and introduced a robotaxi.
Chief Financial Officer Taoufiq Boussaid talked to the WSJ Leadership Institute’s Mark Maurer about its self-driving ambitions and the potential for additional funding from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which first took a stake in the company in 2018 and now owns a majority stake. Edited excerpts of that conversation follow.
How reliant is the company's fate on the Saudi Arabia investment?
They're not only a financial investor, they're a strategic investor. We are also a domestic priority for them because we're building a plant there—we're contributing to the strategic vision that the kingdom has in terms of establishing an automotive ecosystem. There are so many things that we are working on together, on AI and autonomous. They have been very supportive so far.
How do you think about your capital needs as you roll out new vehicles?
Our $4.6 billion of liquidity allows our runway to extend into the first half of 2027. Within this timeframe, we will finalize the investment that we need in our factory in Saudi Arabia. The factory is virtually built. In the next seven to eight months, we will install and fine-tune the equipment for production. The heavy investment in R&D is over.
Yes, we will need additional financing in the future. We have already demonstrated the way we do it in partnership with the Public Investment Fund; this will continue. We might go back to the market. Different types of instruments are available.
How do you navigate the cost of investing in robotaxis?
You have typically two models: companies that have invested in building their data centers, some others developing their own chips. We are following a completely different route.
We want to reach the same type of end results, probably a bit earlier than the competition, by partnering with other companies who have demonstrated capability to do it. This is how you should read, for instance, our partnership with Nvidia. Nvidia has their own AI model for autonomous driving. It is an open-source model. Big original equipment manufacturers are already using it. Nvidia has the hardware, the technology, the capabilities, so we partner with them. It gives us a fast track at a fraction of the cost of what other OEMs would be investing.
Do you foresee major adoption of AI in your manufacturing operations?
AI is something that will be relevant, mainly in the SG&A [selling, general and administrative expenses] part of our organization. In the manufacturing part, we wanted to automate as far as we could. We are already lean. What will happen potentially in manufacturing is that over time we might need additional resources to sustain the growing production that we will have in the coming years. AI will optimize the throughput time and some of the logistic flows, but it won't completely replace humans.
We do not intend for AI to fully replace our employees within SG&A functions. The goal is to provide them with tools to augment their work, allowing individuals to spend more time on impactful projects, while leveraging AI tools to accelerate daily tasks.
—Mark Maurer
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