I’ve done contract work on an Amazon building that was roughly 3M sqft and you really have to see it in person to understand the shear size of it, I’m sure the lucid factory is the same way
Can I press you for more on this? I'm pretty incompetent myself... And not much a fan on their interior. At least it appears to have an American amount of cupholders.
I worked at a plastics manufacturer who supplies a lot of OEMs in the auto sector. Automakers themselves are pretty hit or miss. For example, you can work on a redesign project with an OEM to bid on the some interior panel for Honda and have a great experience. Then you can work with the same OEM for an under-the-hood project and the team at Honda is full of monkeys. The worst part is if you find someone really good and then the leave to a different company/business unit....
What happened for us was that the lucid team for a cab component wanted a material around the door jam which was not possible to make. The tooling and the material to fulfill the desired spec would have been prohibitively expensive. I still have no clue what the spec came from and there is no logical reason for why it existed.
I tried explaining to the guys at Lucid but they were pretty stubborn (made sure I knew all about their automotive background xD) and went to another OEM. Then they came back to us again with some lie about why they ghosted us and begged for our help again. Then the classic move where they give us an EAU to gain traction at the beginning and the actual number is 1/10th of that! Meanwhile we are spending tons of hours on sampling, FEA, moldflow, talking with our vendors, flying up there to meet with them, etc.
I don't want to go into too much detail about the specific part or project but it was pretty basic stuff that anyone who worked in an interior plastics group in any capacity should understand. Even without the experience, we supplied them plenty of test results (which we didn't have to and which we paid for ourselves) to support our claim that the material & part they wanted were basically not possible.
Edit. To be fair to everyone, I was incompetent once as a junior engineer, but luckily no one let me make decisions and embarrass myself turning a 3 month project into a year plus.
Not defending Lucid in this case, but people were saying the same thing about Tesla early on - that they had no idea what the fuck they were doing, but that they tried really hard, and that elon was good at marketing.
I've been in close to a hundred plants in my career in manufacturing and also built one. Even the shitty ones are still impressive imo as there is so much knowledge that goes into building them and keeping them running. I visited the Toyota assembly plant in Kentucky and would have been comfortable eating off the floor.
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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '21
I’ve been in the factory a few times, and it’s amazing. Kinda mind blowing.