Lucid Motors units document as Gravity gross sales choose up and tax credit score expires

Lucid Motors delivered a document 4,078 autos within the third quarter, possible buoyed by a mix of extra Gravity SUVs hitting the highway and a rush of consumers profiting from the expiring federal EV tax credit score.

The Saudi-owned luxurious EV startup continues to be approach off the projections it used to go public in 2021 — a transaction that netted it $4 billion. However Lucid Motors has seen deliveries steadily climb during the last two years. The third-quarter supply figures introduced Monday mark the seventh consecutive quarter that Lucid Motors has seen gross sales enhance.

Lucid Motors was not alone in seeing a giant third-quarter bump in EV gross sales. Tesla recorded its greatest quarter in firm historical past, and legacy automakers like Ford and Common Motors noticed huge will increase as effectively. Even Rivian, which is forecasting a worse general yr for whole EV deliveries than 2024 or 2023, noticed a lift within the third quarter.

Like Rivian, solely prospects who leased Lucid Motors autos had been eligible for the federal EV tax credit score, which means the affect of its expiration is tough to quantify. It’s additionally unclear what number of Gravity SUVs had been delivered in comparison with the corporate’s first mannequin, the Air sedan. Lucid Motors will reveal full monetary outcomes for the quarter on November 5.

Lucid Motors has struggled to generate curiosity for its luxurious EVs since going public in 2021, with former CEO Peter Rawlinson brazenly admitting the corporate wanted to beef up its advertising operations. Earlier this yr, the corporate introduced it signed actor Timothée Chalamet to be its first “world ambassador.” The corporate has additionally benefited from rental gross sales and firm leases in some quarters, as TechCrunch beforehand reported.

The corporate can be more and more trying to Saudi Arabia — which owns round 60% of the publicly traded firm via its sovereign wealth fund — as a marketplace for its autos. On Monday, Lucid Motors mentioned it constructed greater than 1,000 autos particularly for the Saudi market. (The corporate at present operates an meeting facility within the Kingdom and plans to open a full-fledged manufacturing unit there.)

Lucid has additionally locked in future demand from an unlikely buyer: Uber.

Uber introduced final month plans to purchase not less than 20,000 Gravity SUVs over the following six years and use them as robotaxis on its community. For that deal, Lucid Motors will work to combine autonomous automobile firm Nuro’s expertise into the autos.