Lucid Motors aims to roll out the first batch of autonomous vehicles for Bolt as early as 2028, Chief Executive Officer Silvio Napoli told the Financial Times. The partnership was announced on Thursday with no financial terms and no date for Bolt to begin ordering.
“The idea is as soon as possible,” Napoli said. “It gives us confidence in the way forward [and] gives confidence to our board and to our investors. Financially, it is a very important step for us.”
Bolt and Lucid declined to give the FT financial terms or an ordering timeline. TechCrunch, reporting separately, said no money has changed hands and Bolt has not placed an order.
The joint release had described a partnership under which Bolt aims to deploy at least 25,000 fully autonomous Lucid vehicles across European cities, on Lucid’s upcoming Midsize platform, using NVIDIA Hyperion.
Bolt described it as “a major step toward” its ambition of 100,000 autonomous vehicles on its platform by 2035, an ambition Bolt first set with Stellantis in December 2025.
Why 2028
The proxy statement of April 23 puts the start of production of the Lucid Midsize Plus, the robotaxi-modified variant of the platform that Uber has committed to, at late 2028.
The sentence appears unchanged in the April 8-K, the May 10-Q and the August 10-Q. The Bolt release specifies the same platform, and Napoli told the FT the cars would be built on “its EV platform for affordable models.”
The consumer Midsize is on an earlier clock.
Napoli said on the August 4 call that it would come “most likely” in the second half of 2027 from the AMP-2 plant in Saudi Arabia, a year later than the late-2026 date given in April.
The robotaxi variant is a modification of a car that has to exist first, and Kay Stepper, then VP of Autonomy, said at the March investor day that the platform’s new driver-assistance hardware, with upgraded compute and additional sensors, would be ready in 2028.
The platform carries three consumer models, the Cosmos, the Earth and a third yet to be named, plus the Uber variant.
Neither the Bolt release nor Napoli’s remarks say which of those, if any, the Bolt vehicle would be derived from, or whether a car running NVIDIA’s stack rather than Nuro’s is a separate variant, a separate line or a separate agreement.
Not Exclusive
Napoli told Bloomberg Television a few hours after the announcement that the Uber arrangement does not prevent Lucid from supplying other operators.
“As you know we have an ongoing project with Uber, extremely important, which is due to launch either end this year or beginning next year,” he said. “So there is no exclusivity, but it’s really about building on a platform, on our experience, and having two companies joining together. We bring EV technology and they bring the European platform.”
On the August 4 earnings call, Napoli had put the Uber commercial launch at “late 2026.” His phrasing on Thursday was “either end this year or beginning next year.”
Asked how the company would split output between consumer cars and robotaxis, he said “the future will tell us, we don’t have an exact split,” and that the robotaxi market was at the beginning of what he expected to be exponential growth.
He described the Midsize platform as “coming in next year” and the Saudi factory as “nearing completion” with a grand opening planned for 2027, both consistent with the August guidance.
The Deal
The FT‘s characterisation places the Bolt arrangement a step earlier than Uber’s was at the equivalent moment.
When Lucid and Uber announced their partnership on July 16, 2025, the first Vehicle Production Agreement was signed and filed with the SEC the same day, with a minimum of 20,000 Gravity vehicles over six years, Nuro as software provider and $300 million of Uber investment.
The second agreement of April 14, 2026 added a minimum of 25,000 Midsize Plus vehicles and a further $200 million, taking the aggregate to at least 35,000 and the investment to $500 million.
“Unlike Uber, Bolt will not take a stake in Lucid as part of the deal, according to a person familiar with the matter,” FT reported on Thursday.
Uber therefore has two vehicles on two clocks: the Gravity Plus, with an engineering fleet of nearly 100 cars in the Bay Area and Houston and regular production Napoli has said starts in the fourth quarter, and the Midsize Plus from late 2028.
Bolt has only the second.
Bolt’s release describes no production agreement, no minimum quantity and no investment. As a memorandum of understanding, what exists is the intent.
Whether Lucid files an 8-K on the arrangement over the next hours or days would settle whether a contract follows.
The Shares
Lucid’s shares were at $4.24 in pre-market trading at 8:13 a.m. Eastern, up 4.95% from Wednesday’s close of $4.04.
The surge continued after the CEO’s interview with Bloomberg and the stock was trading 8.92% higher at $4.40. The stock is down 58.3% this year and 78.5% over the last twelve months.
