While Lucid is looking to open its first overseas production plant, which it plans to build in Saudi Arabia, the manufacturer is also looking at expanding its home factory, in Casa Grande, Arizona. According to previously revealed plans, Lucid has four phases of expansion planned for the facility that will see its surface area rise from 999,000 square feet today to over 5.1-million square feet by 2028.
Teslarati says it obtained information about this Phase 3 AMP-1 plant expansion and it notes that the process will begin next year and take until 2024 or 2025 for this particular stage (the third of four) to be completed. It also states that the second stage of expansion, which was started last year, will continue through 2023, in parallel with the third stage.
Phase 2 was started in 2021 and it entails the construction of a new building that will allow Lucid to increase its production output (it will feature a powertrain plant, a stamping plant and a general assembly area). The manufacturer recently announced that it was cutting its annual production forecast again, so this year it’s only expecting to deliver no more than 7,000 units, considerably less than the 20,000 cars it was hoping to build.
Gallery: Lucid Air Start Of Production
Lucid wants to be able to manufacture 500,000 vehicles by 2025, and the proposed plant in Saudi Arabia, which will be known as AMP-2, has a projected annual production capacity of 155,000 units. The automaker plans to invest $3.4-billion over the next 15 years to build, expand and operate the facility.
Initially, the AMP-2 factory will only assemble kits manufactured in Arizona, but over time, the goal is to make the plant capable of building cars, not just assembling them. Lucid has also signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Finance which has agreed to buy up to 100,000 Lucid vehicles over the next 10 years.
According to plans made public by Lucid, the company intends to ship 1,000 to 2,000 vehicles per year for the Saudi Arabian government and aims to increase that to 4,000 to 7,000 units annually by 2025. Lucid produced 700 Air electric sedans in the first quarter of 2022 and 360 of them were delivered to customers, and even though the ramp-up isn’t as quick as anticipated, the company is slowly increasing its output every month.
