Automotive: Lucid losing $0.5M on every EV it sells

Car manufacturer Lucid loses $0.5M for every Electric Vehicle (EV) it sells. How long will it be before it goes bankrupt?

–by Mark Cipolloni–

Don’t order the flowers and plan the funeral just yet, but it’s getting close.

Lucid posted second-quarter results on Monday that once again fell well short of analyst expectations.

The company posted $150.9 million in revenue from the 1,404 vehicles it sold in the three-month period. Coupled with a net loss of roughly $764 million, the results equate to a loss of more than $500,000 per vehicle.

Analysts wearing rose colored glasses were encouraged by Lucid’s outlook for the rest of the year, as the company confirmed its full-year production target.

“The tone of the call was notably more positive than we have heard recently,” Chris McNally, an analyst with Evercore, said in a Tuesday note.

“With yesterday’s news of price cuts, investors will now question how much volume can grow on price reductions.”

All car manufacturers except Tesla are losing their shirt on EVs.

Lucid is slashing the price of the Air EV by up to $12,400 through August 31 and the Air Pure AWD by $5,000 in an effort to sell more cars, but slashing prices means less profit per sale.

Legacy car companies like Ford and GM are losing billions as they try to transition their fleets away from internal combustion engine vehicles to expensive EVs that only high income people can afford.

The brutal reality is that a pending battery crisis looms due to supply chain issues (lack of battery materials because tree huggers oppose new mines), and rising interest rates that make raising money harder to do.