Struggling EV maker Lucid Motors has begun cutting 15% of its US workforce, effective Monday, a source close to the matter told EV.
Additionally, the Saudi-backed EV maker weighs a far deeper reduction of up to 40% in its loss-making European operation.
The region’s business continues to run at a steep loss, selling an average of about 1.5 vehicles a day across Europe, the same person said, and the potential 40% cut there remains under consideration.
The US reduction marks the fourth formal workforce cut at Lucid since 2023 and the second this year, landing barely four months after the company eliminated 12% of its US staff in February.
Lucid cut roughly 1,300 jobs, about 18% of its workforce, in March 2023, then around 400 positions, or 6%, in May 2024.
The EV maker reported approximately 9,000 employees globally at the end of 2025, a record and more than double its 2021 level, after hiring heavily for manufacturing and its Saudi build-out even while trimming salaried and overhead staff.
Hours after EV‘s report, Lucid said this Monday that the impact extends to 18% of its US workforce.
“On June 22, 2026, Lucid Group, Inc. (the “Company”) announced a plan (the “Plan”) designed to advance the Company’s path toward profitability and positive cash flow generation by streamlining its organizational structure, optimizing operating expenses, and aligning production plans with anticipated demand,” the company said in a SEC filing.
“This involves a reduction of the Company’s current U.S. workforce by approximately 18 percent, including full-time employees, contractors and hourly production workers in manufacturing,” Lucid added.
The company’s hiring has since collapsed.
Open positions have fallen from nearly 800 a year ago to about 180, a drop of roughly 76%, as Lucid streamlines under new chief executive Silvio Napoli.
Even as US roles fall, the company has said it expects to add manufacturing workers in Saudi Arabia as it expands its plant there, underscoring that the cuts are concentrated in salaried and overhead functions rather than on the factory floor.
The European retrenchment would mark a sharp reversal.
Only months ago Lucid was preparing to expand into the UK, Spain and France, even as sales across its existing European markets stayed minimal.
Lucid registered just 35 vehicles across Europe in May, according to official data compiled by EV, a volume that has left the region’s sales and service network heavily underused.
A reorganisation that keeps widening
The cuts also follow days after the exit of Emad Dlala, Lucid‘s Senior Vice President of Engineering and Software, who left after nearly 11 years.
In confirming his departure, the company said it was “transforming its organization to accelerate innovation and strengthen execution” under Napoli, and signalled that more changes were coming — language that now reads as a prelude to these reductions.
Dlala’s exit marked the 15th departure of a C-level executive, senior vice president or vice president since October 2023, by EV‘s count, leaving Senior Vice President of Design and Brand Derek Jenkins as the sole survivor of the leadership team that ran the company only a few years ago.
Lucid has now lost its chief executive, chief financial officer, general counsel, chief engineer and most of its senior leadership in under two years.
Founder and former chief executive Peter Rawlinson moved to a senior advisory role in February 2025, announced minutes after the company’s fourth-quarter 2024 earnings; CFO Sherry House had left in December 2023; and General Counsel Matthew Everitt departed in September 2024, ten months after joining.
Other exits include digital chief Michael Bell in May 2024, operations head Steven David in February 2025, quality vice president Jeri Ford in October 2025, and strategy and business-development chief Claudia Gast, who resigned in February 2026 and resurfaced weeks later at General Motors as deputy chief financial officer.
Earlier this month, EV reported that a senior director of supply chain had also left ahead of the planned summer unveiling of the Cosmos midsize SUV.
From the software crisis to the top job
Dlala, who joined in 2015 when the company still operated as Atieva, had risen to oversee all product development only seven months ago.
His promotion traced back to a November shake-up, when Lucid ousted chief engineer Eric Bach and replaced much of its software leadership as it scrambled to fix the troubled launch of the Gravity SUV.
Bach, a former Tesla engineering director who had joined in 2015, later sued Lucid for wrongful termination, a claim the company called “absurd.”
James Hawkins, vice president of engineering, left in December 2025 and now lists himself as a director of engineering at Google DeepMind.
Under Dlala’s brief watch, Lucid shipped the most comprehensive software update in its history and later said it had resolved close to 95% of the issues flagged by owners and reviewers, even as complaints persisted into the spring.
As part of the latest reorganisation, the company said vehicle-engineering head Vivek Attaluri and software head Marc Solsona Palomar would report directly to Napoli, flattening the senior layer that Dlala had occupied.
Napoli, the former Schindler Group chief, ended a 14-month search for a permanent chief executive when he was named to the role on April 14 and formally assumed it on June 1, with former interim chief executive Marc Winterhoff returning to chief operating officer.
A delicate moment
Lucid shares have slid to successive record lows in recent weeks, and the company delivered just 3,093 vehicles in the first quarter, a 42% drop from a year earlier, after a 29-day halt to Gravity deliveries tied to a supplier defect now at the centre of a federal securities class action.
Its first-quarter net loss widened to about $1 billion, and the company suspended full-year guidance of 25,000 to 27,000 vehicles pending an update later this year.
The retrenchment also sits awkwardly beside the targets Lucid laid out at its first Investor Day in March, where it sketched a path to 100,000 vehicles a year by 2028.
Standing between that ambition and the company’s thin order book is the Cosmos midsize SUV, a sub-$50,000 model on a new platform that is meant to carry the brand beyond the low-volume Air and Gravity and toward the mass market.
The cuts land less than a year before that vehicle is due to start production at the company’s Saudi Arabian plant.
