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Enlarge / The Nikola Two truck drives out on the stage at an April 2019 event. (credit: Megan Geuss)

Lidar startup Luminar is going public, the company announced on Monday. Instead of going with a traditional IPO, Luminar is jumping on the latest Wall Street fad: merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). Merging with a SPAC allows a startup to go public more quickly, with less paperwork and more certainty about the sale price. The deal gives Luminar, which only expects to sell about 100 lidar sensors this year, a post-money valuation of $3.4 billion.

It's the latest in a string of companies connected to the electric and self-driving car revolutions that have gone public using a SPAC. Most have found strong interest from investors.

In March, electric truck startup Nikola announced that it would go public with help from a SPAC. By the time the merger concluded three months later, Nikola's value had shot up seven-fold. It has since settled down to four times the initial sale value. That values Nikola—a company that has yet to deliver a single vehicle to customers—at $14 billion, about half the value of Ford.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Napster, the file-sharing business that devastated the music industry at the turn of the century, has been sold to UK technology company MelodyVR in a $70 million deal.

The acquisition from US company RealNetworks is the latest attempt to transform the famous tech boom brand, which was cofounded in 1999 by digital pioneer Sean Parker, who went on to be an early Facebook investor.

Having found fame as a website that allowed millions of people to share music illegally over the internet, Napster was shut down in 2001 before being resurrected as a streaming platform.

Enlarge / This cutaway shows how Lucid has packaged the battery modules in the Air.

When Lucid Motors revealed the range of its forthcoming electric sedan, plenty of eyebrows were raised. Independent testing confirmed that a Lucid Air, which enters production later this year, traveled 517 miles (832km) on a single charge. At the time, however, we didn't know the battery capacity of that test vehicle, since Lucid has previously stated that the Air would be available with packs varying from 60kWh to 120kWh. On Wednesday morning, we got our answer: 113kWh.

That might come as a little disappointment to those who were hoping that the entry-level model (which is expected to start at approximately $60,000) would have such long legs. But 517 miles from 113kWh is 4.57 miles/kWh (13.6kWh/100km), which is still extremely efficient by EV standards and would equate to up to 274 miles (440km) of range for an Air with a 60kWh pack.

Previously Lucid has said it's planning 60kWh, 100kWh, and 120kWh packs for the Air. If those numbers are total kWh as opposed to useable kWh (which is always a lower number to prevent the battery from completely discharging) and the total capacity of the extended range pack is 120kWh (for a usable capacity of 113kWh) then a 60kWh Air would probably have a usable 56.5kWh, which should equate to 258 miles/415km).