Lucid Motors expanding Arizona plant

The US electric car manufacturer Lucid Motors has begun the announced expansion of its plant in Casa Grande in the US state of Arizona. The company, which is now listed on the stock exchange, also presented its first quarterly financial statement.

The expansion is expected to increase production capacity from the current level of up to 34,000 electric cars per year to 90,000 vehicles per year by the end of 2023, the company said in its quarterly report. This includes additional space for the production of the Lucid Air electric sedan as well as capacity for the manufacturer’s second model, the electric SUV developed under the name ‘Project Gravity’. The company announced the expansion in March when it received approvals from the Casa Grande City Council.

Phase 2 will add 2.85 million square feet (about 265,000 square metres) of manufacturing space. It will also further vertically integrate production processes, Lucid writes. The vehicle plant is also known as the Advanced Manufacturing Plant (AMP-1). A few miles away from AMP-1, the company operates the powertrain assembly ‘Lucid Powertrain Manufacturing Plant’ (LPM-1).

The company now has more than 17,000 reservations for the Lucid Air, which recently began series production and first deliveries. Of these, 13,000 reservations were made during the third quarter, representing an order backlog of more than $1.3 billion (€1.14 billion), according to the company.

Lucid does not go into financial figures such as revenue and net income in its announcement of the company’s first quarterly figures – as deliveries only started at the end of October and thus in the fourth quarter, there was hardly any revenue anyway. Instead, the focus was on the IPO by merger, which brought in 4.4 billion dollars (3.87 billion euros) on the balance sheet. The other key figures only emerge from the separately published investor presentation: quarterly revenue was 232,000 dollars (204,000 euros), but the net loss was 524 million dollars (460 million euros).

“We are tremendously excited by our accomplishments in our first quarter as a publicly traded company,” said Peter Rawlinson, CEO and CTO of Lucid. “We successfully began production of vehicles for customer deliveries, continued investing in capacity expansion of our manufacturing facility in Arizona, and opened new retail and service locations in advance of the Lucid Air launch.”

lucidmotors.com (announcement), lucidmotors.com (presentation as PDF)