In an email to employees, Lucid Motors CEO Peter Rawlinson announced a restructuring plan to cut costs, including the reduction of approximately 400 employees, or about 6 per cent of its workforce. The job cuts will be completed by the end of the third quarter. Lucid estimates that it will have to pay 21 to 25 million dollars in severance payments, health benefits and outplacement services, among other things.
Lucid Motors is taking precautionary measures and seeing a general slowdown in EV demand. The company just recorded record delivery figures in Q1/2024 and has seen the momentum continue into the current quarter. Deliveries between January and March were up 39.9% year-over-year. However, absolute numbers indicate it still has a long way to go to grow into a high-volume brand like Tesla. Q1 2024 sales stood at just 1,967 vehicles, which was just 0.5% of Tesla’s business during the same period – 386,810 vehicles.
Currently, the Lucid Air is the only car the Lucid has on sale. The company has introduced the Lucid Gravity SUV as the second model. Despite the change in market dynamics, it plans to start production at the end of 2024. A higher-volume future EV, which will be a mid-size model, is also on track and will hit the assembly line in late 2026.
Discussing Lucid Motors’ Q1 2024 results, Rawlinson said that the Gravity’s total addressable market is six times larger than the market the company could access in 2023. For the record, the American luxury EV brand sold 6,001 vehicles in 2023. Hopes are even higher for the first mid-size EV, which it plans to launch at an attractive base price of around $48,000. However, it needs to closely monitor and protect its current operations to fund those opportunistic future projects and commercialise them perfectly.