Is it possible to be a CEO in 2025 and not catch a case of AI fever? The latest company to catch this particular cold is Lucid, the Saudi-backed electric vehicle startup. Today, it announced a new collaboration with Nvidia to use the latter’s hardware and software, with the aim of creating an autonomous vehicle for consumers. Oh, and the AI will apparently design Lucid’s production lines.
Formed by refugees from Tesla who saw a chance to improve on their past work, Lucid has already built the most efficient EV on sale in North America. But until recently, it also just had variants of the same Air sedan to offer consumers, before the Gravity SUV joined the range this year.
The company will need to start selling tens of thousands of EVs a year before too long, especially if it’s ever to become profitable. And that will involve some smaller, cheaper models, starting with a midsize crossover sometime in 2027. A major goal for the first of those EVs is a starting price of less than $50,000, so I hope they’re getting a good deal on the Nvidia GPUs that Lucid now says will enable a “true eyes-off, hands-off, and mind-off” autonomous driving system for consumer-owned vehicles.
