who the hell is the market for this. I can afford one, but I don't want one. Why would I? Most people spending > $100k are likely in their forties or fifties. A lot of them are men. I don't know about you, but at age 50 no way will my bladder let me go 500 miles without a stop. So why would this have ANY value?
To be fair, its a decent strategy to start with a high price car and work down, its the teslas model, but teslas model worked when there was no competing EV. Now there is. its 10x harder for them.
Can you really blame them though? How does anybody compete with Tesla in the EV space? Like for real... how does anybody compete with Tesla's offerings? I don't think anybody can realistically hope to come even close. Tesla continuously lowers prices, improves the specs, adds ADAS capabilities, improves its software, improves the performance through OTA updates, etc. at a blistering pace, and the competition is still having difficulties matching the 2012 Model S. And this it with a ton of incentives and various EV/ZEV/NEV credit systems that are supposed to make things easier for them.
As a result, Tesla has on the order of 80% market share in the US EV market, it now looks like Tesla has also captured a majority of the China EV market while Giga Shanghai is still only operating at a fraction of its full potential, and soon the same thing will happen to the remaining EV markets.
Who is going to interrupt this trend, and more importantly how? Tesla looks to be on track to do the same thing to the automotive industry as SpaceX has done to the commercial launch services industry: disrupt it so hard that all incumbents become completely obsolete and irrelevant.
Competitors have to try something, and directly competing with Tesla is not favorable to them. Rivian was smart to do a pick-up truck, but it is taking too long and now the Cybertruck will be here soon. Lucid also has to differentiate itself somehow, and they've chosen to do it by trying to appear more luxurious with a (for now) much higher range. If Lucid tries to compete with any of Tesla's models directly, their offering will be $10-20k more expensive and probably still not compare favorably (autopilot, software, safety, etc.). Not many people would choose Lucid over Tesla in that case. With this strategy at least some people who are looking for a more luxurious car might choose Lucid or the Taycan over the Model S/X.