Inside Lucid's Plan To Sell More Cars

Lucid Motors raked in $608 million in revenue during 2022 but still reported net losses of $1.3 billion. That's about half of the $2.6 billion the fledgling EV manufacturer lost in 2021, which, while demonstrating that Lucid is moving in the right direction, is still a huge sum to be out.

Lucid's Q4 and full year financial results for 2022 paint a rather worrying picture for the company and its investors. Gross profits decreased over the previous year with production bottlenecks blamed for missed production targets. Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson attributes this in part to the fact that the production lines at AMP-1 have been designed to operate at a higher capacity than they were able to because of parts shortages, and this reduced line speed created additional problems for production.

Reservations were another area of concern for the American automaker, with the 34,000 vehicles reserved as of November 2022 falling to somewhere around the 28,000 mark by the earnings call on February 21st. This still represents a potential $2.7 billion in sales, but the drop in reservations will certainly have the manufacturer and LCID bulls worried.

Lucid's Solution
Lucid's remedy for these problems is quite simple: get more cars into owners' hands and raise more awareness for the brand. The company has focused on establishing its production flow until now, but plans to switch its efforts to getting as many cars out the door as possible from now on. If building more personalized specification Lucid Airs has to come at the expense of churning out thousands of cars, so be it.

Lucid built over 7000 vehicles in 2022 and delivered around 4500. The company hopes to as much as double those numbers in 2023 with production guidance currently set at 10,000-14,000 cars. Lucid Air deliveries are underway in Europe and the Middle East, where Lucid is backed by heavy investment from the Saudi Public Investment Fund, and has a deal to supply the Saudi government with up to 100,000 Lucid vehicles. Construction is already underway for Lucid's AMP-2 factory within the Kingdom.

Lucid's AMP-2 factory in Saudi Arabia will assemble knock-down car kits before moving to full production.

Lucid hopes to increase demand and customer awareness by marketing more Lucid Air configurations:

“We're making a conscious decision to match production, whilst focusing upon cost-effective build quality. We are focused on building versions of Air to meet customer interest and getting Lucid Air into the hands of more drivers who can become brand advocates.”

The company's leadership believes that once there are more Lucid Airs out in the wild the public's awareness of the brand will increase leading to more business.

Deliveries of Lucid Airs equipped with the optional "Stealth Look" package have already been delayed by parts shortages, though the rest of the company's revised targets are still being met at this time. Production of the range-topping and Tesla Plaid-killing Lucid Air Sapphire are scheduled to begin this summer and reservations for the upcoming Lucid Gravity SUV are set to open later this year.

Related Story: Lucid Opens Studio In EV-Loving Norway

Images by Lucid Motors licensed by CC BY 4.0.

James Walker is an Automotive Journalist at Torque News focusing on Lucid Motors. If it's got wheels he's interested, and he's looking forward to seeing what kind of cars the EV revolution brings us. Whether it's fast, slow, new, or old, James wants to have a look around it and share it in print and on video, ideally with some twisty roads involved. You can connect with James on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.