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By Nick Carey, European Autos Correspondent

• Greetings from London, where I am filling in for Joe White who’s off having some well-deserved rest in Detroit.

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  I just returned from my first trip to the United States since moving to Europe mid-pandemic three years ago. Sitting at a stop light in Davenport, Iowa, a week ago, I found myself surrounded by three Teslas and a Rivian pickup truck.

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  If you’d told me in the summer of 2020 that Teslas would be spotted in cluster like that on the banks of the mighty Mississippi, I might have scoffed at you. Further east, in Chicago, I quickly lost count of Teslas on the road. 

   

  There is clearly a very long way to go, as shown by the vast numbers of huge fossil-fuel pickups rolling along highways under big skies in the Midwest.  

   

  But in the meantime, there’s plenty of mostly EV-related news to catch up on from the autos world today:

   

  • Lucid joins the EV price war

  • Nikola gets a new, new boss

  • A test for self-driving cars in San Francisco

A new participant in the EV price war

Analysts have been watching for months in expectation that Lucid would eventually be forced by the price war Tesla started to discount its models. Over the weekend, the U.S. electric vehicle maker did just that. 

Lucid reduced the price of the Air Pure by $5,000 to $82,400, and cut the more powerful Touring and Grand Touring versions by $12,400 to $95,000 and $125,600 respectively.  

Tesla’s price cuts starting in January have sparked intense competition in China, where about two dozen automakers have followed with discounts of their own to stay competitive and stoke demand. 

They have also prompted global automakers including Ford, General Motors, Honda and Stellantis to slash prices as well. But the key difference between those established players and Lucid is they are all still making money off internal combustion engine models.  Like other EV startups, Lucid has been burning through cash as it tries to ramp up production. 

Just how bad that cash burn is amid Tesla’s price war will become clear as Lucid and others report earnings this week.  

Stephen Girsky, Nikola’s latest new boss

Speaking of startups that have been burning through cash, Nikola announced its fourth new CEO in as many years on Friday, knocking off more than a quarter off the electric truck maker’s market value.

This time the startup has turned to former GM veteran Stephen Girsky, who took over from Michael Lohscheller, who is stepping down due to a family health matter.

The switch comes at a pivotal moment in the rollercoaster history of Nikola, whose founder was convicted of fraud late last year. The company had just cash and cash equivalents of $226.7 million at the end of the second quarter – in an industry where legacy automakers can easily spend more than $1 billion on a new model. 

Nikola’s investors last week approved a proposal that will allow the company to issue more shares. For the third time since February the company also flagged “substantial doubts” about its ability to continue as a going concern for the next 12 months as it awaits “critical” additional capital.

Available everywhere in San Fran?

Self-driving car companies face a key test in San Francisco as Alphabet Inc’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise seek to expand their commercial services – with no human safety driver on board – across the whole city, night and day.

After two delays, a state agency is due to decide on the issue this week. But there is plenty of opposition from the city’s transportation agencies, fire department, and planning department, which say the vehicles are a menace, tying up traffic, mucking up emergency services, and driving erratically. Waymo and Cruise say the unmanned vehicles are safer than human-driven cars.

The Aug 10 vote by the California Public Utilities Commission has become a battle pitting technologists, lobbyists and citizens hopeful self-driving cars will be a boon for San Francisco against agencies, safety advocates and residents fearful the city is a laboratory for unproven tech.

General Motors said on Friday that it aims to add jobs in 2024 despite concerns raised by autoworkers that the shift to EV will reduce the need for labour.

U.S. trucking firm Yellow Corp filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Sunday and said it would wind down after struggling with a mounting debt load and following tense contract negotiations with the Teamsters Union.

The owner of the car carrier Fremantle Highway, which caught fire off the Dutch coast in late July with nearly 500 EVs on board, said on Friday it will investigate the cause of the incident.

Daimler Truck said on Sunday  that its Chief Financial Officer Jochen Goetz – largely responsible for the truck maker’s successful spin-off from Mercedes – had died in a “tragic accident,” but provided no further details.

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