Lucid Is Committed To Building the Automobile In An Entirely New Way

Mike Bell's been fascinated by how things work from the time he was a boy. He'd take apart various household items and (usually) put them back together—not always to the delight of his parents. "I wanted to be an engineer kind of forever," Bell said of his desire to do something useful, to learn "how to make things that work with nature in a good way." That insatiable curiosity led him into, yes, mechanical engineering, programming, and electrical engineering. He parlayed that into 17 years of ups and downs at Apple, where he played a key role in the development of various products including the iPhone and Apple TV.

Bell has made several subsequent stops during his 30-plus-year career, including his latest position as Lucid's senior vice president of digital, responsible for the automotive startup's software development, advanced driver assistance systems, and IT. He's learned several important life lessons along the way, including the belief that anything's possible, you need to lead by example and stay technically competent, and make sure you reward good people for their hard work. He's also gained significant insights about the auto industry during his time at Lucid and a brief stint at another startup, Rivian, which he shared with us.

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What hurdles do you see facing legacy automakers in the software-driven age?

It's been eye-opening for me, coming into the automotive space. Cars now are more like server clusters than traditional automobiles. It takes a completely different mindset to build what's essentially an electronics product that also happens to go 170 mph.

The biggest thing I see is that traditional automotive manufacturers don't seem to understand that you can't apply old ways of doing things to this new software-defined vehicle paradigm. The suppliers you had 10 years ago would give you parts, and you assembled them into a vehicle. But suppliers don't have the software and hardware competence you need to build something like a Lucid Air.

You have to do most of the stuff in-house. Writing a spec, giving it to a third party, waiting six months, then slapping together the piece you get—you're gonna end up with something pretty mediocre against what happens if you bring the talent in-house to own everything yourself.

This is now a systems play: The software and the hardware, the mechanics and the dynamics, they're all one thing. And a lot of people aren't willing to make that leap and adopt this new way of doing things.

Given your in-house mindset, how closely do you work with partners and suppliers?

Just because we designed stuff in-house doesn't mean we have to build it. We'll design all our computing units going forward, but we're certainly not a computer-board manufacturer.

It's fine to go to a supplier for things that have been around forever, that are very well understood and not particularly high tech. You have to have acceptance criteria, performance criteria, and you have to treat those partners like an adjunct of your own company.

The mistake I see people make is they think they can throw a set of requirements over the wall, get something back, and just slap it into a product without verifying it, without working with the partner all along the way.

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What can automakers and suppliers learn from tech companies?

Many of the traditional Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers aren't going to be able to supply the level of software required by folks like ourselves, and we're going to be relying more on Silicon Valley companies. One of the biggest names in the business right now is Nvidia. They're an amazing graphics-card supplier, and they've really figured out how to take that tech and their software competence and make an amazing product in the autonomous driving space.

One thing Silicon Valley companies bring is, frankly, the sense of urgency and speed. I'm used to working such that, if we find an issue, if it takes a week to fix it, that's a long time. In automotive, you certainly need to spend the time to make sure things are functionally safe and working. I don't believe in beta-testing stuff on customers. But I think the auto industry needs to adopt a little more of the Silicon Valley mindset: We fix things in days not weeks, or weeks not months.

Then there's the level of innovation and the speed of progress. The thing that will propel the software-defined vehicle forward is to take advantage of these huge leaps in technologies and capabilities. It's not just 10 percent better every year, it's a dramatic leap. We've seen this in computers and phones for years. Applying this to the automotive space is just fascinating to me.

Again, you have to merge the best of Silicon Valley with the best of the auto industry: You have to use these new technologies but package them and test them and put them together in a way that they have the reliability of the best of the traditional auto space. It's not easy. But it's what you have to do to have a really compelling product going forward.

What do you think consumers have yet to grasp about how software is impacting their vehicles?

People don't understand the power of software-defined vehicles, where the functionality and behavior of the vehicle can be changed through software. They haven't made the leap yet that the same thing the company can do to your phone, pushing updates, we can now do to your car.

We've done [roughly 100] software updates since we first shipped [the Lucid Air]. Some were fixing bugs, but a lot of them addressed customer feedback. A customer today can literally help us fix something that will change for them next week. I think once they realize this, it's eye-opening.

Our customers told us, "Hey, we'd like it if you made the handles work a little bit differently." I talked to my boss, Peter [Lucid CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson], about it. We sat and thought about it and said, "My gosh, they're right." And within weeks we pushed the software update over the air that changed the door handle behavior. And people are like, my gosh, this is magic. You know, it's like, are there witches in my car?

How long do you expect it'll be before software can take complete control of the car?

It's happening today. If you have enough sensors, the appropriate sensors, and the appropriate computing power in a car today, it's as reliable as your average driver. The catch is, when your average driver causes a crash, their insurance goes up. When an autonomous car causes a crash, it's the front page of The Wall Street Journal .

It's a policy and societal question: When are we willing to say, we're OK, the cars are good enough, we want to allow them on the road full time, with humans who are driving [other cars]? The real question is when and how we can bring that technology cost down. I believe you have to have cameras and radar and lidar and ultrasonics. How long will it be until we can provide that full set of sensors, and the computing power, in a low-end introductory vehicle? I think that's gonna be a more difficult problem than making it work on a more expensive car.

The other thing is, not only do you have to make sure your car works with every road marking—legal or unintentional—you also have to make sure your car doesn't fall victim to someone who is going out there and doing something nefarious. Remember the old thing from the Wile E. Coyote cartoon, painting road stripes that end in the side of a mountain? The car has to make the right decision there, every time.

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Light Bulbs and Landing the Glider

Halfway through his undergraduate studies, Mike Bell had the proverbial light bulb moment when he realized that software was going to become a foundational part of our lives. "I had this 'aha!' moment that the future was going to be all about software and electrical engineering," Bell recalled. "My college was one of a handful that had ARPANET [a foundational technology of the internet] in the early '80s. The first time you realize you can click the button and an email goes from there to California before you can blink—or around the world—you can see that's gonna be a big deal at some point."

Just as formative were the 17 years Bell spent at Apple. They weren't always great times, and the company almost went bankrupt more than once during his tenure at the tech colossus. But through the ups and downs he learned several important lessons, chief among them his management style and how he runs programs. "You really have to lead by example; you can't phone it in," he said. "You have to stay technically competent, or else you're just a talking head and you don't really have the right to manage the group. Make sure you reward people for their work, allow your people to get credit for what they do."

Just as important to Bell is his firm belief that anything is possible. "Given enough time or enough money, you can make just about anything happen," he said. "So when I hear people tell me, this can't be done, that's not the way I work. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, it was kind of a 'burn the boats, we're going for it' philosophy.

"It turns out that if you really apply most of your energy to making something happen, as opposed to worrying about contingencies, you get darn close to what you were shooting for, you end up with an excellent product. It's like flying a glider: When you're coming in for a landing, there's no, 'Well, I don't like it, I'll go around' … you're going to land. And you're going to make it work."

FAST FACTS: MIKE BELL

Resume Key Points

• CTO, Rivian
• CEO and president of Silver Spring Networks, provider of networking platforms and solutions for smart energy networks
• Vice president, Intel, various roles including New Devices Group, Mobile and Communications Group, and Ultra Mobility Group
• SVP, product development, Palm
• Vice president, Apple, played significant roles in iPhone, iMac, AirPort, and Apple TV product development

Education

• Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering, University of Pennsylvania

Present Position

• SVP, Digital, Lucid Motors, leading software development, ADAS, and IT efforts

Hometown

• Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Currently Residing

• Palo Alto, California