Lucid Crash Continues

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Aug 8, 7:30AM EDT

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Lucid Crash Continues — © Courtesy of Lucid

Electric vehicle maker Lucid Group Inc. (NASDAQ: LCID | LCID Price Prediction) showed again why it would not be one of the winners in the crowded EV segment. Its quarterly figures were awful. (These are America’s best and worst new cars.)
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Lucid posted total sales of 1,404 of its sedans. It lost $764 million, compared to $555 million in the same quarter a year ago. Revenue moved to $151 million from $93 million a year ago. All the numbers disappointed investors. Lucid’s car sales were so poor that they might as well have been zero in the eyes of Wall Street.
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Lucid says it will produce about 10,000 cars this year. Tesla made 480,000 in the most recent quarter. Every major car company globally will come to market with a line of EVs, most of which will launch in the next three years. Lucid will be overwhelmed. Among other problems, it only has one model line.

Lucid also cut car prices by as much as $14,200, a sign of slack demand. This follows a series of price cuts by Tesla to drive demand. According to Tesla’s earnings, and sales, it is working. It likely will start a long price war to increase sales and hurt margins. Lucid cannot afford that.
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Lucid’s CEO and CTO, Peter Rawlinson, dared to paint his picture as a good one: “We look forward to exciting new products in the second half of this year, including the planned start of production of the Lucid Air Sapphire and the Lucid Air Pure Rear Wheel Drive, plus the highly anticipated unveiling of our new SUV, Lucid Gravity, forthcoming in November.”

Lucid’s shares are down over 70% in the past two years. Tesla’s are 6% higher.
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Large car companies already have gambled that EVs are the future. Their total investment to be part of this future is in the tens of billions of dollars. Not all companies will be winners, but they will flood the market nevertheless. And each has huge product development, dealer network and marketing. Most have iron-clad balance sheets.

No matter how one views it, there is no room for Lucid.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.