Lucid Motors doesn’t know how many EVs it will build this year

Lucid Motors said Tuesday that it’s no longer sure how many EVs it will build or sell this year, as it navigates a transition to a new CEO and a companywide cost-cutting push.

The company said in February that it planned to build between 25,000 and 27,000 vehicles this year. That’s far from the hundreds of thousands of vehicles that Lucid Motors estimated it would build and sell this year when it went public back in 2021. But it would have represented a significant bump from last year’s figure of around 18,000.

The change to Lucid’s guidance was announced during the company’s first-quarter earnings call by chief financial officer Taoufiq Boussaid. It comes just a few months after the company laid off 12% of its workforce, which TechCrunch first reported in February. Lucid Motors said in a filing Tuesday that those layoffs will cost the company around $40 million in the near term, though it believes the cuts will ultimately save as much as $500 million over the next few years.

Boussaid said the decision to pull Lucid Motors’ guidance for the year was a “governance decision,” and that incoming CEO Silvio Napoli is conducting a review of the business. Boussaid said Lucid Motors expects to provide a “full updated outlook” during the second-quarter earnings call in a few months.

“It’s clear that realizing Lucid’s full potential will require sharper focus and consistent execution, particularly around simplification, prioritization and speed,” Napoli said during the call.

Lucid Motors also shared Tuesday that it had a worse-than-expected first quarter, largely due to a 29-day production disruption and a temporary stop-sale that was a result of problems with a seat supplier. These problems wound up inflating Lucid Motors’ inventory, and the company said it will have to carefully manage production volume in the near term in order to reduce that glut.

“We are not constrained on capacity. We are constrained by our own discipline not to build inventory ahead of demand. As market conditions develop, we will scale production accordingly,” Boussaid said.

This all comes as Lucid Motors is supposed to start building its first high-volume vehicle this year, priced at under $50,000. The company has said it would begin producing the first EV on this mid-size platform by the end of 2026. On Tuesday, the company kept the focus on next year, saying it “remain[s] on track for production ramp-up of the mid size in 2027.”

Lucid Motors is also planning to launch a robotaxi service with Uber and Nuro by the end of this year, using autonomous versions of its Gravity SUV. Lucid confirmed Tuesday that it remains on track to start building the road-ready versions of those vehicles in the fourth quarter.