In front of an eager audience at the Los Angeles Auto Show in November 2023, Tesla's rivaling automaker Lucid (LCID) unveiled the next vehicle in its sparse lineup of electric vehicles.
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Slotting alongside its Air sedan is the Gravity, a premium seven-seat electric SUV with up to 440 miles of range. It is suitable for bigger families, more passengers, and loads of stuff.
"Gravity embodies all of our learning, the next generation of our tech, and all of our loving attention to detail," CEO Peter Rawlinson said during the reveal last year. "It is the product that is set to redefine the SUV in this new electric era."
Today marks an exciting landmark for our company. Production of the Lucid Gravity is now underway at our factory in Arizona!
— Lucid Motors (@LucidMotors) December 5, 2024
This milestone is a celebration of the hard work by our passionate and dedicated team to bring this groundbreaking SUV to life. Its combination of space… pic.twitter.com/ItJsOL3H3Y
[Lucid's] Gravity comes to earth
About a month after opening for orders and launching an interactive configurator on its website, Lucid announced in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) that it had begun series production of the Gravity SUV on December 5 at its Arizona factory.
In its post, the first Gravity SUV rolls down the assembly line with Rawlinson in the passenger seat, as workers at the Casa Grande factory clapped and cheered on.
"Today marks an exciting milestone for our company. Production of the Lucid Gravity is now underway at our factory in Arizona!" it said in the post. "This milestone is a celebration of the hard work by our passionate and dedicated team to bring this groundbreaking SUV to life."
Lucid has not disclosed when it will begin delivering Gravity SUVs to its customers. However, those seeking to buy anything but the top-of-the-line Grand Touring trim will have to wait. On November 7, the automaker said that Gravity's lower-priced trim, the Touring, won’t start production until late 2025.
In an interview with the Automotive News Daily Drive podcast, Lucid's CEO noted that they would gradually increase production over time to maintain a certain level of quality.
“It will ramp gradually through ’25,” he said. “We have to get the quality right and really it’s going to run into ’26 before we start really, really getting to high volume.”
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Down to earth at a bad time?
But despite CEO Rawlinson's optimism that U.S. buyers will opt for Gravity over its Air sedan simply because it is a crossover SUV, Lucid's future is highly dependent on Gravity's order books bursting at their bindings.
As an automaker that barely makes two different cars in its lineup, its reliance on sales of the Air sedan has left a sour taste in the company. According to their latest projections, Lucid expects to make and sell just 9,000 Airs by the end of 2024.
As a company with a slow-selling niche-market sedan, sales of Lucid's $94,900 SUV must be a hit if the company wants to break its streak of hemorrhaging money.
During its Q3 2024 earnings, it reported a net loss of $950 million. In the previous quarter, it reported a net loss of $790 million and in the first quarter, it reported a net loss of $681 million.
Currently, Lucid is majority-owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which regularly injects the Newark, California-based company with much-needed cash. Shortly after it announced a $790 million loss during the second-quarter of 2024, the Saudi fund put up another $1.5 billion to keep automaker afloat.
In a statement, Lucid interim CFO Gagan Dhingra said that the money is expected to help keep the company solvent for a while.
“The additional $1.5 billion commitment by an affiliate of the PIF announced today is expected to provide sufficient liquidity into at least the fourth quarter of 2025,” Dhingra said.
During its third-quarter earnings report, Lucid reported that as of September 30, it had $1.9 billion in cash and cash equivalents.
Wrapping up Tech & Manufacturing day: A new sneak peek at one of our upcoming midsize vehicles, set for production in late 2026 with a starting price under $50k.
— Lucid Motors (@LucidMotors) September 10, 2024
With leading technology and efficiency, it will be able to deliver the same range as competitors while using a… pic.twitter.com/yJ5re2fIlt
Are cheaper Lucid's coming?
In a post on X on September 20, Lucid provided a visual "sneak peek" into one of its upcoming models.
Though it is still obscured in a silhouette, the curvy, new Lucid is the first in what it calls its midsize SUV platform, a series of lower-priced, mainstream models aimed squarely at Tesla's volume sellers: the Model Y and the Model 3.
In the post, it notes that the still to be named car will feature "leading technology and efficiency" and that "it will be able to deliver the same range as competitors while using a smaller battery."
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However, there is one important detail to note: while Lucid says that it's mid-size vehicles will have "a starting price under $50k," it does not anticipate production until "late 2026."
With the Trump administration set to begin on January 20, policies affecting EVs, including the $7,500 tax credit, are reportedly on the table to be axed. However, while most of Lucid's lineup is largely unaffected, academics like UC Berkeley professor Joseph Shapiro predict that sales of new EVs will fall 27% in a situation similar to what Trump's transition team proposed.
"It's a rapidly growing market and relatively new technology, but [eliminating the federal EV tax credit] is not trivial. I mean, $7,500 is not trivial,” Shapiro told Yahoo Finance.
Lucid Motors is traded on the NASDAQ as LCID
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