If Lucid used Tesla's sensor suite instead, they would still be losing $249k on every car they sell (although the naive calculation that yields the $250k loss figure is highly misleading for a company in Lucid's phase of growth, and does not accurately reflect marginal cost). Tesla "lost" a similar amount on their early Roadsters, and their early Model S's in 2012, even with no sensors at all. The cost of the off-the-shelf sensors is a drop in the bucket compared to other factors.
Tesla has already shown that just cameras is enough for mediocre-quality L2. (The extremely wide ODD is impressive, and the quality on highways is foreseeably approaching L3 level, but the quality within the trickier parts of the ODD is still mediocre, compared to a skilled human driver.) Tesla has emphatically not yet shown that pure vision will be enough for L4/Robotaxi.
Counterintuitively, adding lidar dramatically reduces the compute requirements; it doesn't increase it. That's because a tremendous amount of value (constructing ground-truth 3D maps) is obtained instantly and for free by lidar, whereas it requires a huge amount of computation (and lag) when done by pure vision. The same is true to a lesser degree for radar and ultrasonics.
Lucid has a daunting uphill climb ahead of them, but there are many aspects of their product that are extremely impressive, and I do hope they survive.
I'm just going to have to disagree with you there on multiple counts for multiple reasons. Adding lidar does NOT reduce the compute requirements, because you STILL need camera vision and the corresponding neural networks to do things that lidar is completely and utterly useless for--Reading signs, identifying and determining the color of stoplights, lane markings, etc. So with Tesla's approach, you get all the info you need from the single set of cameras. With Lucid's approach, you need those same neural networks to read signs, identify stoplight colors, etc...but then you have to do all the lidar processing, the radar processing, you need to localize and fuse that information into one coherent picture of the world around you, etc.
(I do point cloud processing of billions of 3D points from precision measurement hardware for a living, so have a little bit of experience in this area).
I'm willing to bet the incremental cost of 5 radars, N lidars, and the processing sufficient to do the above for an autonomous driving application is going to be significantly north of $1000.
Yes, of course Lucid is losing money on each car for a whole host of reasons--that's why I said
part of. One of Rawlinson's biggest mistakes was that he wanted to get back at Musk so tried to out-Tesla the car. Fine, if you disregard the cost of production you can make a car that outperforms a Tesla. But ultimately you have to make money on the thing, and Rawlinson suffered from the same flaw that most CEOs who try to start a car company suffer from: The inability to recognize that making a profit on the car is key to survival.
But the proof is in the pudding. Can't wait to see Lucid's autonomous driving solution in a few years and compare it to Tesla's. That is, if the Saudis haven't decided to stop funding the black hole they're throwing their money into by that point.