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Lucid Motors has now officially sold more EVs this year than it did in all of last year, and with three months to go in 2024.
The milestone comes after Lucid announced Monday it delivered 2,781 vehicles in the third quarter of 2024. That’s a third straight record quarter for deliveries, though Lucid is still well below the sales figures it once promised as part of the massive $4 billion reverse merger that made it a public company in 2021.
The upward trend in sales is happening at a crucial moment for Lucid, which keeps leaning on its majority owner — Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund — to inject more cash ahead of the launch of the electric automaker’s Gravity SUV later this year. That will be the company’s second model and, perhaps more importantly, comes in a far more popular form factor in its home market of North America.
Lucid did not break down where it’s been generating these increased sales. It may offer more insight when it reports its financial results for the quarter on November 7th. But the company has been stepping up shipments to Saudi Arabia in recent quarters, where it has a facility that performs final assembly of cars that were mostly-built at its main factory in Arizona. (Lucid plans to open a full-featured factory in Saudi Arabia in the coming years.)
While sales were up, the company said Monday that it only built 1,805 Air sedans in Q3, down from the 2,110 it produced in the second quarter. That means it will have to build more than 3,000 EVs in the fourth quarter if it wants to hit its stated goal of making 9,000 vehicles this year — something it’s only ever done once, back in the fourth quarter of 2022.
Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
