Lucid‘s board has decided to slow the company’s push into new European markets and will carry out a reduction of its regional workforce before the end of September, EV has learned.
The move marks the clearest sign yet that the Saudi-backed EV maker is scaling back what it had billed as the largest expansion in its European history, as weak demand and a company-wide restructuring collide on the continent.
The decision follows a string of slipping milestones.
EV reported in early June that Lucid had pushed its planned entries into Spain and Austria to 2027, removing two markets from a plan the company had slated for 2026, and the United Kingdom launch has now been delayed three times to early 2028.
A Shrinking 2026 Map
At the Gravity’s European debut in Germany last September, management told reporters including EV that Lucid would enter eight additional markets in 2026, tripling its footprint to as many as 12 countries.
Last March, at its Investor Day, the company committed to 25 new European locations for the year, a roughly 200% increase over its footprint.
Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Spain and the UK were named across subsequent announcements.
With the UK out to 2028 and Spain and Austria now following to 2027, the 2026 wave centers on Belgium, where Lucid opened a test-drive center on June 2, alongside Denmark, France and Italy among the publicly confirmed markets.
Spain had featured in the company’s public planning for more than a year, and European President Lawrence Hamilton told Spanish outlet Marca in mid-2025 that Lucid aimed to establish a presence in the five largest European markets within 18 months, a window that closes at the end of 2026.
Austria, by contrast, had never been publicly confirmed, making both its inclusion in the internal plan and its delay previously unreported.
A Second Dealer, as the Model Shifts
The slowdown lands as Lucid rebuilds its European sales around partners rather than company-owned studios.
EV exclusively reported in February that the company had signed the Mercedes-Benz dealer group Wackenhut as its first European dealer agent, with sales beginning at Baden-Baden on March 30 and the first distributor-delivered Gravity handed over in Germany in May.
Last month, EV reported that Dutch dealer group Munsterhuis, the Ferrari dealer for the Twente region, is set to become Lucid‘s agent partner in the Netherlands1, the second European retail partner identified after Wackenhut, with the contract about to be finalized.
Former interim chief executive Marc Winterhoff said on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call that Lucid was in advanced discussions with more than 10 additional dealer groups and importer candidates.
According to Hamilton, all new market entries, including Spain, will rely exclusively on local partnerships, while the four existing markets keep their flagship studios under a hybrid model.
Sales Too Small to Carry an Expansion
The arithmetic behind the retrenchment is visible in the registration data.
Lucid registered 319 vehicles across Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Norway in 2025, a 32% decline from 470 a year earlier, and just 54 across the four markets in the first quarter of 2026.
The pace has stayed thin since.
April brought 29 registrations, with Germany accounting for 21, and May rose to 35 units, a 12.9% year-over-year gain. In Norway, the world’s most electrified car market, Lucid has registered fewer than 40 vehicles in total since opening in Oslo in 2023, a portion of them attributed to a local importer rather than to customers.
Chief Financial Officer Taoufiq Boussaid has acknowledged that the current cars are oversized for European buyers, and Hamilton has cast the Air and Gravity as brand-building vehicles, positioning the mid-size platform as the real path to volume.
A Restructuring Reaching Europe
The board’s decision sits inside one of the harshest stretches in the company’s history.
On June 22, Lucid announced it would cut about 18% of its US workforce, roughly 1,500 jobs and its second mass layoff of the year after a 12% reduction in February.
EV exclusively reported on the same day that management was weighing cuts of up to 40% of its European workforce; the board’s move now attaches a timeline, with the regional reduction set to be completed before the end of September.
The cuts have come amid a near-total leadership overhaul.
Silvio Napoli, the former Schindler Group chief, took over as chief executive on June 1, and within weeks Lucid lost engineering and software head Emad Dlala, saw Winterhoff depart on June 22 as the chief operating officer role was eliminated, and on July 2 replaced most of the remaining C-suite, including its chief financial officer.
Lucid lost $2.7 billion in 2025 and remains majority-owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the backstop that lets it absorb repeated cuts without an existential crisis.
A Timeline That Kept Moving
Hamilton’s public statements over the past year, read in sequence, trace how the plan steadily compressed.
He told Automobilwoche last September that Lucid wanted to be represented in 12 to 15 German cities as a first step, growing to 50 to 60 locations, while Winterhoff told Auto Express at the same show that the UK would receive a mid-size-platform model in late 2026.
In January, Hamilton told Dutch outlet Autovisie the company was accelerating, and in February he described Belgium as one of Europe’s most advanced EV markets.
By April, Hamilton told Autocar the UK had slipped to 2027, citing the cost of engineering the Air and Gravity for right-hand drive.
In mid-May, Winterhoff told EV at the Financial Times Future of the Car summit in London that the target of roughly 12 markets was intact, saying “the number is still around seven or eight this year.”
The same day, Hamilton told The Independent the UK had moved again, to “the beginning of 2028 rather than 2027.”
