Lucid Motors Plans Factory in China

On Tuesday EST, Peter Rawlinson, CEO of Lucid Motors, an American electric vehicle company, told CNBC that the company is planning to build factories in the Middle East and China sometime around 2025.

As an electric vehicle manufacturing start-up, Lucid Motors is regarded as one of Tesla’s strongest competitors. Founded in 2007, the company is headquartered in Newark, California, USA. Its founders are two Chinese-born businessmen, namely Xie Jiapeng, Tesla’s former head of battery R&D, and Wen Shiming, a former middle-level manager of Oracle, a language service company. Rawlinson, the company’s current CEO, is a former chief engineer of the Tesla Model S.

Lucid shares have soared more than 80% since its IPO through a SPAC deal in July. Lucid Air, its first product, has been produced and delivered by its flagship facility in Casa Grande, Arizona at present. Recently, in September of this year, the Dream Edition Range version of Lucid Air sedan was recognized by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as an electric vehicle with the longest endurance mileage to date. It can travel 520 miles when fully charged, a distance that puts it 100 miles more than the new version of the longer endurance version of the Model S.

Rawlinson said that the firm plans to produce about 575 electric vehicles by the end of this year, and the output will increase to 20,000 in 2022. Its Arizona plant is currently able to produce 34,000 vehicles per year with further expansion planned over the next few years.

“We are going to quadruple the size of that factory in Arizona. We’re building out a 2.85 million square foot expansion to get ready to build 90,000 units per year, and the site itself is with its phase three capable of nearly 400,000 units per annum,” he said on Tuesday.

China is home to the world’s largest auto market, and EV pioneer Tesla opened a factory in the country in 2019. A number of Chinese EV start-ups, such as Xpeng Motors, Li Auto and NIO, are working to capture consumer attention as the market becomes increasingly favorable to the new energy vehicles.