Lucid Motors completes first phase of US factory
Lucid Motors has completed the first construction phase of its Casa Grande production facility in the US state of Arizona. The commissioning of the production facilities and processes will have already begun since production of Lucid Air is scheduled to start in spring 2021.
According to Lucid Motors, the company plans to initially produce up to 30,000 units annually to supply the global markets, starting with North America. These production vehicles will initially be Lucid Air Dream Editions, which will soon be followed by Grand Touring and Touring models. The basic version, Lucid Air Pure, will be added to the program in early 2022 and will be available from $69,900.
The ground-breaking ceremony took place almost exactly one year ago. “We broke ground on the 590-acre Lucid AMP-1 site in Casa Grande, Arizona, on 2 December 2019, and slightly less than a year later we have completed the first purpose-built EV factory in North America,” said Peter Rawlinson, CEO and CTO of Lucid Motors. Rawlinson alludes to the fact that the Tesla plant in Fremont was not built by Tesla, but was previously a Toyota factory.
The company had already published a photo of the construction site in the summer, and the two large halls were built in June. Even then, there were reports that Lucid was already running the first production facilities, especially the paint line, in a test operation. Now the work on the exterior surfaces is probably also so far advanced that production of Lucid Air can start in a few weeks.
With a view to the further development of the company, the factory has been designed in such a way that further phases of expansion at the site are possible. The next phase is scheduled to begin in early 2021 so that the brand’s first SUV can be produced in 2023 under the name Project Gravity. A total of four phases are planned up to 2028, in which the factory floor space is to be increased from the current 999,000 square feet to 5.1 million square feet (from around 93,000 square meters to 474,000 square meters). In its final form, the factory will have a production capacity of up to 400,000 units per year.
Lucid presented the series version of the Air in September. The top model offers an output of 588 kW and a range of the equivalent of 932 kilometres. We have summarised the exact technical data of the individual versions here. In October, it was announced that the basic version planned for 2022 would cost $77,400 – or $69,900 after deduction of the US tax credit.
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