Tesla rival Lucid Motors halved its 2022 production target on Wednesday, citing “extraordinary supply chain” challenges as it tries to ramp up production and meet “strong demand”.
The California-based group, backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, said 2022 production is now estimated between 6,000 and 7,000 cars, down from an earlier projection of 12,000 to 14,000, which was a cut from a start-of-year forecast of 20,000 vehicles.
Shares of the electric carmaker were already down 50 per cent this year, reflecting numerous challenges in scaling up production of its Lucid Air — a luxury electric vehicle that starts at $89,000 and was named MotorTrend’s Car of the Year for 2022. Shares fell an additional 12 per cent after-hours on Wednesday.
“We’ve identified the primary bottlenecks and we are taking appropriate measures, bringing our logistics operations in-house, adding key hires to the executive team and restructuring our logistics and manufacturing organisation,” said chief executive Peter Rawlinson.
“We continue to see strong demand for our vehicles, with over 37,000 customer reservations, and I remain confident that we shall overcome these near-term challenges.”
The 37,000 reservations total $3.5bn in potential sales, the company said, but Lucid reported just $97.3mn of revenues in the June quarter, well below estimates at $147mn as it delivered only 679 cars in the three-month period.
Lucid CFO Sherry House said the company has $4.6bn in cash, “which we believe is sufficient to fund the Company well into 2023”.
Despite recent stock market woes, Lucid had a market valuation of $34bn at the time of its earnings on Tuesday, compared to $54bn at GM and $60.4bn at Ford, companies that routinely sell millions of vehicles per year.