A seat belt recall filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has disclosed the most precise production figure ever made public for Lucid Motors‘ Gravity SUV — a number the company has never voluntarily reported.
Additionally — according to data compiled by EV — the company’s interim CEO Marc Winterhoff praised the model’s market performance during what was, at the time, a publicly undisclosed safety recall process.
The recall, submitted on March 26, covers 4,476 Gravity vehicles produced between December 2, 2024, and February 14, 2026 — meaning, all the SUVs Lucid had produced until then.
The NHTSA estimates that 97% of those units — approximately 4,342 vehicles — have the defect.
The figure covers “all customer vehicles manufactured before February 14, 2026,” the date Lucid resumed assembling vehicles with seats built to the original specification.
Lucid produces the Gravity at its Casa Grande, Arizona plant for North American and European markets.
The company also began assembling the model from semi-knocked-down kits at its facility in King Abdullah Economic City, Saudi Arabia, in 2025 for the Middle Eastern market.
Since the defective seats were supplied by Camaco to the Arizona factory before being installed in vehicles or shipped as part of SKD kits, the recall population likely encompasses the vast majority of the model’s global production through that date — though the precise scope of NHTSA’s jurisdiction over Saudi-assembled units is unclear.
Lucid does not disclose production or delivery figures by model.
Its quarterly reports combine the Air sedan and the Gravity SUV into a single total, and the company declines to provide a breakdown.
The NHTSA figure is the first time a Gravity-specific production number has appeared in any official filing.
What the Numbers Show
Between the fourth quarter of 2024 and the end of 2025, Lucid produced a combined 21,226 vehicles across both models — 3,386 in the final quarter of 2024 and 17,840 throughout 2025, according to the company’s revised production figures published in February.
The 4,476 Gravity units recalled represent roughly 21% of that combined output.
The remaining vehicles were Air sedans as the third model — named Cosmos — only begins small volume production by the end of 2026.
Stop Sale and Production Halt
The recall filing’s chronology reveals a more disruptive sequence of events than previously known.
On January 22, Lucid discovered the seat belt defect during an unrelated FMVSS compliance test.
By January 28, after finding “multiple out-of-specification seats at the manufacturer and in Lucid factory inventory,” the company issued a stop sale for all Gravity vehicles.
From January 28 through March 6, Lucid conducted multiple tests to determine whether a reinforcing bracket could bring the defective seats into compliance.
A February 4 test resulted in another failure.
On February 11, seat supplier Camaco began shipping corrected seats to Lucid’s factory.
On February 14, Lucid resumed assembling vehicles with seats built to the original specification.
The stop sale, combined with the separate delivery halt over a defective middle seat component that EV reported on February 12, effectively shut down the Gravity programme for approximately three weeks.
The Q4 Question
The recall data takes on added significance in light of management’s repeated assertions that the Gravity became the company’s dominant model in the fourth quarter of 2025.
Chief Financial Officer Taoufiq Boussaid said late last year that the fourth quarter would be “primarily the Gravity quarter,” adding that the SUV would “represent the majority of our production and our sales.”
Interim Chief Executive Marc Winterhoff echoed the claim at a Cantor Fitzgerald conference in March, saying “the majority of our vehicles were actually Gravities” in the fourth quarter.
Lucid produced 7,874 vehicles in the fourth quarter.
For the Gravity to represent a majority of that figure, more than 3,937 units would need to have been the SUV.
With 4,476 total Gravity units produced across the model’s entire history through February 3 — and very little production before the fourth quarter, based on third-party data — the math suggests the Gravity could have constituted a bare majority of Q4 production, with the remaining few hundred units built in the weeks before the January 28 stop sale.
On the delivery side, however, the available data is harder to reconcile with management’s claims.
Cox Automotive reported that 4,330 Lucid vehicles were sold in the US during the fourth quarter, of which the Air sedan accounted for 3,188 units and the Gravity for just 1,142 — placing the SUV at roughly 26% of domestic sales.
The data covers US retail sales only and does not include units delivered in Canada, where Gravity sales began in October 2025, or in the Middle East, where Lucid‘s majority shareholder — the Saudi Public Investment Fund — is based.
Even so, Lucid delivered 5,345 vehicles globally in the fourth quarter.
For the Gravity to represent a majority, it would have needed to account for more than 2,672 units worldwide — requiring more than 1,530 international deliveries on top of the 1,142 domestic units, in a quarter when European deliveries had not yet begun.
Lucid disputed Cox Automotive‘s earlier figures, telling CNBC they were “completely inaccurate” and that Gravity deliveries were “already in the thousands.”
The company has not provided its own model-level breakdown.
A Slow Ramp
Third-party data suggests the Gravity ramp was heavily back-loaded into the final months of 2025.
Cox Automotive reported just five Gravity SUVs sold in the US during the second quarter of 2025 and only 300 units through mid-October.
Customer deliveries did not begin until late April 2025, months after the first units were handed to employees and family members in December 2024.
Winterhoff acknowledged publicly in June 2025 that the production ramp-up was “slower than desired,” even as customer feedback on the vehicle was “phenomenal.”
By March, the interim CEO struck a more confident tone.
Gravity x R1S
Speaking at Lucid‘s Investor Day on March 12, Winterhoff compared the Gravity’s trajectory to those of the Rivian R1S and the Tesla Model X in their early quarters.
“Gravity is off to a good start. We ramped it up last year,” Winterhoff said before establishing the comparison.
“When you compare it to other vehicles that have been introduced in the market — and you look at three quarters after the introduction into the market — we are right there where the Rivian R1S was at that time, slightly behind the Tesla Model X, but let’s not forget Tesla Model X was in a completely different time.”
An accompanying slide, titled “Lucid Gravity is gaining momentum,” showed US unit sales for luxury electric SUVs in each model’s third quarter on the market.
The chart placed the Gravity at approximately 2,900 units — behind the Tesla Model X at roughly 3,800 but narrowly ahead of the Rivian R1S at approximately 2,800.
The Cadillac Vistiq, BMW iX, Cadillac Escalade IQ, Polestar 3, and Volvo EX90 followed at lower volumes.
The fine print on the slide, however, noted that the data was sourced from S&P Mobility as of January 2026 “except for Lucid Gravity.”
The Gravity figure was self-reported by Lucid — the only model in the chart not independently verified by a third-party data provider.
It is unclear which specific quarter the approximately 2,900 figure refers to.
Winterhoff referenced “three quarters after the introduction into the market,” and Lucid delivered its first Gravity units to employees, family, and friends in the final days of December 2024.
Depending on how the starting point is defined — from those initial employee handovers or from the start of customer deliveries in late April 2025 — the third quarter could correspond to different periods.
If the figure reflects Q4 2025 US sales, it would represent a substantial discrepancy with Cox Automotive, which reported 1,142 Gravity units sold in the US during that quarter — less than half of Lucid‘s own claim.
The slide was presented on March 12, nearly three weeks before the end of the first quarter, ruling out Q1 2026 as the period in question.
Lucid has previously disputed Cox‘s Gravity figures as “completely inaccurate.”
Rivian also does not break out R1S deliveries separately, making a direct comparison difficult.
However, Rivian’s total deliveries across all models — including the R1T pickup and commercial vans — reached approximately 24,500 in the three quarters following the R1S launch in late 2022.
Cox Automotive data places total Gravity US sales at approximately 1,442 in its first three quarters, with global deliveries at 1,801 for the full year 2025.
The pace accelerated in the fourth quarter.
Lucid‘s Investor Day presentation, showed the company’s total monthly production rate climbing from approximately 1,000 vehicles in July and August to 3,200 in both November and December — reaching the 2,200-per-month run rate targeted for 2026.
February Delivery Halt
The recall chronology confirms that the January 28 stop sale overlapped with a separate quality issue.
As EV reported on February 12, Lucid had halted all Gravity deliveries over a defective middle seat component that required physical replacement.
A customer in Florida awaiting delivery of a Grand Touring he had ordered in late January said his vehicle arrived at the Riviera Beach delivery centre but the company informed him it could not be released until the part was replaced.
“Lucid has halted all Gravity deliveries due to some sort of ‘middle seat component’ and will not release them until that part has been replaced,” the customer, X user Brian Stone, wrote. “The only timeline I have received is ‘it will take a bit’ so I have no idea how long this delivery hold is expected to last.”
The halt came just days after the company’s then-recently appointed SVP of Engineering and Digital Emad Dlala said Lucid had resolved up to 95% of the software issues that had plagued the Gravity since launch.
The NHTSA filing shows that the seat belt stop sale was issued on January 28 — two weeks before EV‘s report on the middle seat halt.
The two issues appear to have compounded each other, effectively freezing the Gravity programme for much of late January and February.
The Recall
The seat belt defect involves improperly welded second-row lap belt anchors that could fail in a collision, putting the vehicles out of compliance with Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards 207 and 210.
Lucid said the issue originated at Camaco Automotive, a Farmington Hills, Michigan-based seat supplier, which changed its manufacturing process “without notice to or approval by Lucid.”
The weld on the outboard lap belt anchor bracket was found to be shorter than specified and not in the correct location.
Camaco has since reverted to the original specification, implementing an updated welding map, verified penetration and length of the welding seam, and a template to validate the weld.
No injuries have been reported.
Lucid will inspect all 4,476 affected vehicles and either install a reinforcement bracket with adhesive or replace the entire seat at no cost. Interim owner notification letters are expected by May 22.
The full remedy will be carried out as a phased recall, with no final completion date yet set.
It is the third recall affecting the Gravity, although the second physical one.
In December 2025, Lucid recalled 66 units over mislabelled front seat backrest covers that could have prevented the side airbags from deploying.
Earlier this year, approximately 3,900 units were recalled over a rearview camera software issue that was resolved through an over-the-air update.
What Comes Next
Lucid is targeting production of 25,000 to 27,000 vehicles in 2026, with the Gravity expected to account for the “vast majority” of additional output.
Winterhoff said in March that “the large sedan segment is not growing, it’s actually contracting in some areas,” and that Air sales are expected to stay flat. That leaves the incremental volume almost entirely dependent on the Gravity ramp.
The company is also preparing to begin production of its third model — a mid-size SUV on a new lower-cost platform — at its Saudi Arabian factory later this year. Boussaid told investors Lucid aims to reach 100,000 units of annual production by 2028.
Lucid is expected to disclose its first-quarter 2026 production and delivery figures later this week.
Motor Intelligence estimated on Wednesday that the company sold 4,985 vehicles in the US during the quarter. Full financial results are scheduled for April 29.
