The other evening, a stranger told Lucid Motors CEO Peter Rawlinson that if he ever came across an electric vehicle that would go 500 miles on a charge, he'd buy it.

"And I said, 'That's Lucid Air!'" Rawlinson recalls, referring to his company's sleek sedan. "He said, 'What? How long has that been in production?' I said, 'Two and a half years.'" He paused. "The world doesn't know that two and a half years ago, we did an electric car with 520 miles."

Rawlinson and I are talking at a noisy Virginia steakhouse over a dinner that would stretch more than two hours. A 67-year-old Briton, he is earnest, soft-spoken—and volubly frustrated: Eight years ago, he set out to make the finest and most advanced EV in the world, one as elegant as a top-of-the-line Mercedes Benz and superior technologically to Tesla's game-changing Model S, whose development he led as chief vehicle engineer.

Rawlinson argues that Lucid's technological prowess—which surprisingly eschews the industry's focus on battery development—should give it bragging rights as America's true U.S. EV champion, while his former boss, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has become "distracted" by politics, robots and artificial intelligence. If he's right, Rawlinson has reached this pinnacle at a superlatively challenging moment for the entire EV industry.