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Lucid CEO and former Model S designer throws shade at Tesla fans, likens group to ‘old petrol fanboys’
When Peter Rawlinson left Tesla in 2012 just before the Model S launched, he probably did not think that his former employer would one day end up becoming the leading force in the electric vehicle industry.
Now the CEO and CTO of Lucid Motors, Rawlinson is gunning for Tesla’s title as the supreme EV maker. He believes the company’s first sedan, called the “Air,” has all the potential to help Lucid overtake Tesla, effectively silencing the “fanboys,” a group of enthusiasts who are widely supportive of the electric car maker and its CEO, Elon Musk.
Peter Rawlinson spent his illustrious automotive sector career at Jaguar and Lotus before joining Tesla in 2008. He left Elon Musk’s Model S engineering team in 2012 and joined Atieva, now Lucid Motors, in 2013 as the Chief Technology Officer. He still holds that title, but another accompanies it as of April 2019: Chief Executive Officer.
In a recent interview with Motortrend, Rawlinson talked about his company’s technology that he believes will pass Tesla, the “fanboys” of Elon Musk’s company, and why the success of the Model S is, at least in part, because of him.
Lucid unveiled the Air in December 2016. Lucid and Rawlinson both claim the vehicle will be capable of 1,000 horsepower and 400 miles of range per charge. While a prototype of the Air managed to prove its range is for real, the horsepower claim is still untested, and Rawlinson knows the doubters still exist. “When I claimed that we would have a 1,000-hp car, or have over 400 miles of EPA five-cycle range, nobody believed it,” he said to MotorTrend’s Kim Reynolds.
His claims do not stop there, however. Rawlinson says the Air will be better than the Model S in every way possible as it equips a power unit capable of more power density than Tesla’s most powerful vehicles. “We’ve got 16.7 kW-per-liter [power density] in our power unit. No one has done that. Tesla hasn’t done that,” he said.
Rawlinson certainly seems like he is motivated by those who speak about Lucid in a bad light, and it is all too familiar for him. “Now I’m having a sense of déjà vu, with history repeating itself,” he says. “Lucid is being put down by Tesla fans. Those old petrol fanboys are the current Tesla fanboys. Very similar rhetoric.”
However, Rawlinson’s rhetoric about his former employer isn’t squeaky clean, either. In 2019, he stated Tesla is not a real luxury brand. “You only have to get inside a Tesla to recognize it’s not really a luxury car. It’s a premium car but not true luxury,” he said.
Perhaps this is why Tesla “fanboys” have been critical of Rawlinson’s new project. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has always said that its competitors are never going to be companies with the same sustainable mission. The companies that are looking to advance petrol-based technology are the real enemy. While there are Tesla fans who are competitive, many are embracing the transition to electrification as a positive thing. Perhaps it is not about the cars at all, but what Rawlinson has said about Tesla in the past.
Additionally, during the interview, Rawlinson says his influence is the reason for the Model S’ success in the electric industry. “Model S was actually styled before I joined Tesla. My task was to retrospectively fit all the bits into it. It was a pretty interesting intellectual puzzle to design a car from the inside out,” he says.
Later in the interview, Rawlinson goes on to say that his thirst for perfection was the reason the Model S became such a successful vehicle. His constant nit-picks and desire to do better drove Tesla’s first sedan to become the pioneer of electric transportation. “But everybody on the Model S team knows I was all over every detail and drove everybody crazy trying to create a car that had to be better and better in every way,” he said.
Rawlinson’s project with Lucid was to be unveiled at the New York International Auto Show last week, but the COVID-19 pandemic effectively shut down all large gatherings. However, the vehicle is scheduled to begin production in late 2020 after its new facility in Casa Grande, Arizona, is complete. Whether the car will live up to its lofty expectations remains to be seen. Still, Rawlinson’s development of the Model S shows he is capable of breaking barriers, and the Air could be the electric industry’s next big thing.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted a photo of himself standing with the Optimus production team inside Tesla’s Fremont factory, arms crossed amid workers in hard hats and safety vests. The image captures a pivotal industrial shift: the same facility space once dedicated to building Tesla’s flagship Model S sedan and Model X SUV is now home to the company’s humanoid robot manufacturing line.
Walking the Optimus production line in Fremont pic.twitter.com/ABS0tuRibW
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2026
Tesla’s Fremont Factory, acquired in 2010 from the former NUMMI joint venture between Toyota and GM, has been the company’s original U.S. manufacturing hub since Model S production began in 2012.
The Model X followed soon thereafter. These premium vehicles offered lower annual volumes, recently around 30,000 combined, compared to the high-volume Model 3 and Model Y lines that continue around the site. Over their combined run, the S and X accounted for roughly 610,000 units.
In late January 2026, during Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings call, Elon Musk announced the end of Model S and Model X production in Q2 2026. The final vehicles rolled off the line in early May. Rather than retooling for another vehicle, Tesla chose to convert the dedicated S/X assembly area into a dedicated Optimus Gen 3 production line.
Model 3 and Y manufacturing remains unaffected. Tesla’s official Fremont Factory page now lists Optimus alongside the 3 and Y as core products.
The conversion was executed with remarkable speed. After production stopped, crews dismantled the existing vehicle line and installed entirely new modular equipment—including lines sourced from Germany and dozens of sub-lines for actuators, batteries, and other components—in roughly four months.
Musk described the timeline as “insanely fast,” noting it would be unprecedented for any other manufacturer. Initial Optimus output is expected to ramp slowly due to the robot’s roughly 10,000 unique parts and the brand-new production processes involved. The Fremont line targets an eventual capacity of 1 million Optimus units per year.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Optimus Development Timeline
- August 19, 2021: Optimus (then called Tesla Bot) formally announced at Tesla’s first AI Day. A concept video showed a person in a suit demonstrating the vision for a general-purpose humanoid capable of dangerous, repetitive, or boring tasks using the same AI architecture as Full Self-Driving.
- 2022: Early prototypes displayed. At the second AI Day in September, semi-functional units demonstrated walking across a stage and basic arm movements
- 2023: September videos showed improved capabilities, including sorting colored blocks, precise limb awareness, and holding a Yoda pose.
- 2024-early 2025: Factory integration videos showed Optimus navigating workspaces and handling objects like battery cells.
- January 2026: Gen 3 mass-production activities began at Fremont, with reports of over 1,000 Gen 3 units already operating inside the factory for real-world learning and AI training
- April 2026: Musk confirms Optimus production on converted Fremont line would begin in late July or August 2026. The Gen 3 reveal, originally eyed for Q1, was pushed closer to production start. A second, much larger Optimus factory at Giga Texas is under construction, with volume production targeted for Summer 2027 and long-term capacity of 10 million units annually
- July 1, 2026: Musk’s on-site visit and team photo confirm the Optimus line is operational and the transition is actively progressing
Tesla positions Optimus as potentially its largest project ever, leveraging vertical integration, AI expertise, and car-like manufacturing know-how to scale humanoid robots first for its own factories and later for broader industrial and consumer use.
The Fremont conversion serves as a critical proving ground for this ambitious new chapter in Tesla’s already-rich history.
Investor's Corner
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
Tesla short seller Michael Burry, the subject of the film “The Big Short,” where he was portrayed by Steve Carell, has revealed he has opened a new bet against the stock.
In a new update to his Substack newsletter in a post titled “Trading Post June 30, 2026,” Burry revealed a new set of bets against Tesla, Caterpillar, NVIDIA, Applied Materials Inc., and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.
In regard to Tesla, Burry wrote:
“And finally I shorted Tesla at 416.22. Happy it jumped back to this level.”
This means Burry likely opened his new short position after the company’s recent rally on Wall Street, which saw Tesla shares sink in mid-May, only to recover to well over the $400 mark. Currently, shares trade at around $427.
The company saw a big Tuesday as shares climbed considerably, over 10 percent. The size of the Tesla short was not provided, nor did Burry give any information on the position’s structure, the number of shares, dollar value, or whether options were used in the short.
The Tesla and SpaceX merger everyone is talking about is quietly building
Over the years, Burry has been one of the more vocal critics of Tesla, calling its share price “media inflated,” and saying it was “ridiculously overvalued” as recently as December.
The company has largely transitioned away from being known as an automotive company and instead is much more widely regarded as an AI play, mostly due to its Full Self-Driving efforts, Optimus robot development, and data collection related to both.
This has not pulled those skeptics away from being vocal about their distaste for how Tesla is valued, but there’s no denying that the company is a global force in many things, including sustainable energy, automotive, and AI.
Wedbush Securities is initiating stock coverage on SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), marking the first comments on the company since it went public several weeks ago. Wedbush and its analyst handling coverage, Dan Ives, are widely bullish on fellow Musk company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).
Ives wrote his first note initiating coverage of SpaceX shares on Wednesday with a $190 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating. The firm believes the company is well positioned off of its IPO because of its wide array of projects, including AI compute power and infrastructure, connectivity projects, and launches.
“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity,” Ives wrote, “Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel and increasing deal flow for its Colossus clusters.”
Elon Musk called it Epic: The full story of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 12
Wedbush leans heavily on Starlink, which they say is the “profitability driver given the strength of its recurring revenue base of ~12 million subscribers as of June 5th.” Ives believes Starlink is still in the “early innings” of penetrating the global telecommunications and broadband market, as it only holds less than a 1 percent share. However, this number is sure to increase over time.
It also highlights the importance of Starship, which it says is an “essential layer” of SpaceX’s overall success. SpaceX developing and displaying the ability to reuse rockets is a major cost and reliability advantage “as it reduces the necessary hardware launch costs while generating a feedback loop for future flights to improve their launch flight rate without accelerating capex spend.”
Finally, SpaceX’s recent AI/Compute projects are also very elementary, Ives writes. It is worth mentioning Wedbush said its $190 price target is derived from a valuation forecast that sees the company yielding roughly $2.48 trillion of implied enterprise value.
There are also some factors that Wedbush did not take into account with its initial coverage. The firm wrote in the note:
“We note that there is optional value coming from Starship’s accelerating scale towards sub-$200/kg unit economics, orbital data centers, and enterprise AI monetization as these factors could drive meaningful upside but these face major hurdles, so we do not take that into account with our valuation.”
SpaceX shares are down just over 2 percent today, trading at around $167 at the time of publication.
Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
