- Lucid is a rising-star electric carmaker but is facing high nickel prices, like other EV startups.
- "I think it would be absolutely foolish of me to say we're never going to raise our prices," CEO Peter Rawlinson told Reuters at SWSX.
- The company's CEO, Peter Rawlinson, is said to be determined to beat out Tesla.
Peter Rawlinson, CEO of electric car startup Lucid, told Reuters on Thursday that the company is considering raising prices on future models.
"There's an inevitability that we will have to look at the price points of models that are coming out in the future," he told the outlet at South by Southwest.
Lucid, a Tesla rival, is one of the few electric car newbies genuinely gaining traction after going public last year, Insider has reported. Its CEO is said to be determined to take on Elon Musk's electric car manufacturing giant – where Rawlinson used to serve as VP of vehicle engineering.
Tesla raised prices on cars sold in the US and China on Tuesday, and Rivian raised them earlier in March.
Rawlinson's company is also dealing with the double challenges of inflation and disruption to global markets after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The crisis drove up the price of nickel, for example, which, as a key component of lithium-ion batteries could boost the cost of making an EV by $1,000 to $2,000, analysts have said. Referencing nickel price jumps, "I think it would be absolutely foolish of me to say we're never going to raise our prices," Rawlinson told Reuters.
Startups like Lucid in particular struggle to manage supply-chain difficulties than older companies because their relationships with suppliers are not as established.
But swapping suppliers on other lagging parts would hurt quality, Rawlinson told the outlet. The company had struggled with supplies of carpeting, glass for windshields, and "some exterior trim parts," Reuter said.
In late February, Lucid revised its 2022 production target downward, to 12,000 to 14,000 vehicles from 20,000. "This reflects the extraordinary supply chain and logistics challenges we've encountered," Rawlinson said in the company's Q4 earnings press release.
Rawlinson told Reuters the company will honor prices for "existing reservation holders," Reuters paraphrased, and that he wasn't worried about short-lived market dips.
"Customer satisfaction and recognition of the quality trumps short-term myopic attention to how many cars we have delivered to customers in a quarter," Rawlinson told the outlet.
Lucid did not immediately respond to a request for comment.