How Lucid Plans to Avoid Tesla's Quality Control Pitfalls

How Lucid Plans to Avoid Tesla's Quality Control Pitfalls

Lucid Motors’ big, $700 million car plant rises in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, and big dreams rise with it. In this EV start-up’s early days—where a few slips could spell the difference between bonanza and bankruptcy—one of those dreams is to avoid the quality nightmares that continue to plague Tesla. The kind that had Elon Musk sleeping under his desk in Fremont, California, famously moaning about his company being “in production hell.”How Lucid Plans to Avoid Tesla's Quality Control Pitfalls

Peter Rawlinson, the former Tesla Model S chief engineer and current thorn in Musk’s side, has no intention of bunking down in Casa Grande. Lucid’s sparkling plant, one hour south of Phoenix, becomes the first brand-new EV assembly plant in North America. (Tesla, Rivian and long-shot Lordstown Motors have all chosen to convert defunct legacy-automaker factories for EV production). How Lucid Plans to Avoid Tesla's Quality Control Pitfalls

Prior to Road & Track’s exclusive all-day drive in the 520-mile-range Air Dream Edition—the unquestioned new benchmark in electric sedans—I toured the facility with Lucid’s manufacturing leaders, each counting decades of car-building expertise. “We are now an automaker, ready to go,” says an enthused Steve Inglis, who clocked 30 years at Ford before joining Lucid as director of body structures manufacturing. How Lucid Plans to Avoid Tesla's Quality Control Pitfalls

“This is production heaven; no production hell is going to happen here,” Inglis vows of the factory, which aims to churn out 20,000 Airs in 2022. About 1100 American employees are already on the job, with the possibility of 6000 if a four-phase expansion goes according to plan.

Musk’s groundbreaking models continue to dominate the EV industry; Tesla is on track for nearly 1 million global sales this year. But beyond the hosannas, Tesla has faced withering criticism for quality-control issues ranging from defective paint, faulty touchscreens and misinstalled seats to unsightly panel gaps that recall Detroit’s malaise era, before the Toyota Production System revolutionized global manufacturing and left Detroit automakers scrambling to adapt.

So How Lucid Plans to Avoid Tesla's Quality Control Pitfalls