- The American EV startup Lucid Motors delivered 10,241 vehicles in 2024, it said on Monday.Â
- That’s a 71% increase over 2023’s sales.Â
- Lucid produced 9,029 vehicles, a 7% bump over the previous year’s production.Â
Lucid Motors ended 2024 with a bang, reporting record deliveries both on a quarterly basis and for the full year.Â
On Monday, the American EV startup said it made 9,029 vehicles last year, a 7% increase over 2023. It delivered 10,241 cars, a respectable 71% jump as compared with 2023’s sales figures. In 2023, Lucid produced 8,428 cars, which was far more than the measly 6,001 it managed to sell. It slashed prices and lathered on incentives in 2024, which likely helped juice sales. As Reuters noted today, that beat analysts’ estimates. Â
Tesla, by comparison, delivered 1.79 million vehicles in 2024 during a down year. It started selling cars over a decade before Lucid did in 2021.Â
Photo by: InsideEVs
It’s a good sign for Lucid that it was able to find more buyers in 2024 than it did in 2023. Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson has said in the past that the startup’s issue is brand awareness, not production capacity. In other words, Lucid could be pumping out a lot more cars—if people knew to buy them.Â
That’s not a great situation to be in for an early-stage car company. In the auto business, scale is everything. As you sell more cars, you can better spread out the enormous costs of developing new products and keeping factories running. That’s exactly what Lucid—and other EV startups like Rivian, mind you—needs to do to survive long-term.
It’s fortunate in that it’s found a deep-pocketed backer in the form of the Saudi Public Investment Fund. But it currently loses money hand over fist. And the only way to solve that is by selling far, far more than 10,000 cars a year.Â
This is also way behind where Lucid hoped to be just a few short years ago. In 2020, Lucid said it aimed to sell 90,000 vehicles in 2024. But it never found a large enough market for the Air sedan, a highly impressive but ultimately niche vehicle that was its debut model. And it had to kick its next act, the Gavity SUV, down the road a couple of times. Lucid has a plan to turn things around, though.Â
In December, the startup finally started producing the Gravity at its plant in Arizona. The three-row SUV should unlock a broader customer base and drive far more sales than the Air was able to reel in. Lucid started delivering the $94,900 SUV to select buyers recently. If all goes well, 2025 should be a far bigger year of growth for Lucid than 2024 was.Â
Contact the author: Tim.Levin@InsideEVs.com