Lucid Motors

According to Automotive News, a major automaker is in discussions with American company Lucid Motors to purchase its high performance electric powertrains.

Speaking at a recent Bloomberg business summit in San Francisco, Lucid’s chief technology officer Peter Rawlinson said the company is “currently in dialogue with companies that are interested,” in the company’s motor and battery technology.

Rawlinson, who was a lead engineer on the Tesla Model S, declined to comment on which automaker it was talking to, but the company was previously in early takeover discussions with Ford. Lucid no longer wants to be absorbed into another company, Rawlinson said, and is instead focused on a lesser partnership that “wouldn’t dilute” its brand.

Rawlinson told Automotive News that traditional automakers, like Ford for example, lack the technical expertise to develop advanced electric powertrain’s like Lucid’s. One prototype for the company’s first car, the Lucid Air luxury sedan, features a 400 hp front motor and a 600 hp rear motor for a massive 1,000 hp combined output. A stripped out version of the prototype performance sedan, dubbed the Air Alpha, reached a speed of 235 mph on the runway at the Transportation Research Facility in Ohio back in 2017.

The automaker is targeting a driving range of around 240 miles from launch for the Air, but it also has ambitions to offer a battery pack that can provide up to 400 miles of range.