"We'd spotted the fact that EVs were viable, and no one knew!" – Why Lucid is "doing it all" to improve EVs

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He says this experience, plus the arrival of a 1938 Ford 8 inherited from a departed uncle, decided the course of his life: he admits to an intense interest in cars 'from which I have never looked back'.
At Jaguar in his early thirties, Rawlinson took responsibility for advanced body design and crashworthiness, working on the XJ41 and XJ42 coupé and convertible projects and acquiring a helpful grounding in digital engineering.
Impetuously, he left Jaguar to start his own kit car company, making Imola cars that didn't sell but which had the virtue of using folded stainless steel for a monocoque chassis design that both influenced the Lotus Elise's extruded aluminium chassis and encouraged Hethel to offer its inventor a job working alongside Lotus greats such as John Miles and Roger Becker.
A Lotus Engineering consultancy job sent Rawlinson to California where he 'got to know people' while working on an aluminium spaceframe for J Mays, soon to be boss of Ford Design. Along the way, he also designed the Th!nk electric city car for Norwegian clients, using the battery compartment to provide extra chassis rigidity in a way that would later stand him in good stead.
A friend, Adrian van Hooydonk, now BMW's design chief, put Rawlinson in contact with Elon Musk, then a billionaire rocketry enthusiast with a passion to build electric cars. Franz von Holzhausen, an American who had worked for Mazda and GM, was already working on the Model S's long-nosed shape, which was to prove less than perfect for the first Tesla.