As EV exclusively reported early Monday, chief operating officer and former interim CEO Marc Winterhoff is leaving Lucid Motors.
Lucid said it is eliminating the chief operating officer role, ending a run of roughly two and a half years that carried Winterhoff from management consultant to interim chief executive and back to a COO seat he held for barely three weeks.
In the same SEC filing, the struggling premium brand announced it would cut about 18% of its US workforce to match expected demand — months before starting production of its cheapest ever model.
What the company’s announcement left unsaid is how far back Winterhoff’s history with it reaches.
By his own account, he began working with Lucid in 2018, five years before he formally joined as an executive — meaning Monday’s departure closes a relationship with the EV maker that has run for roughly eight years.
Lucid never disclosed that tie when it announced either his hiring or his elevation to the top job.
The relationship runs through a tenure defined by the distance between the targets Winterhoff helped set and the results the company delivered.
From Roland Berger to the C-suite
Winterhoff spent most of his career in consulting.
He was a senior partner at Roland Berger from 2011 to 2023, leading operational and cost work for large automakers, and earlier spent more than a decade as a director at Arthur D. Little in Frankfurt.
He arrived at Lucid as COO in December 2023, reporting to then chief executive Peter Rawlinson, with responsibility for manufacturing, supply chain, international expansion and go-to-market strategy.
Winterhoff’s ties to Lucid ran deeper than that hiring date suggested.
People familiar with Lucid‘s leadership, who spoke to EV on condition of anonymity, said his relationship with the company stretched back years before he formally joined — to his time as a consultant at Roland Berger.
Winterhoff’s own public statements bear that out.
“When I started to work with Lucid in 2018,” he told Semafor in 2025, the company was still planning a large factory in China — a plan he said he argued against, before the decision was taken to build in Saudi Arabia instead.
He described that choice of Saudi Arabia over China as one his own side pushed through, recalling that the idea was met with disbelief at the time.
That account places him inside Lucid‘s strategic planning some five years before he became COO, and three years before the Air, its first car, reached customers in 2021.
The company’s own announcements never surfaced that history.
When Lucid introduced him on November 7, 2023, the press release presented him as an outside hire arriving from Roland Berger’s automotive practice, credited with 27 years in the automotive and software industry, and said nothing of any prior work with Lucid itself.
In that same announcement, Winterhoff framed the move as a fresh start, saying he “couldn’t be more excited to join” the company.
Lucid struck the same note when it elevated him to interim CEO in February 2025, again describing his background through Roland Berger, with no reference to the years he would later say he had spent working with the company.
Those people said the earlier work, carried out while Winterhoff was a Roland Berger partner, reached into the go-to-market and volume strategy the company took into its public listing — the same ambitious forecasts it has spent years failing to meet.
The forecasts
The strategy Winterhoff was involved in aimed for Lucid to sell hundreds of thousands of cars a year by now, one of the sources told EV.
In the investor presentation for its 2021 merger with Churchill Capital, Lucid projected deliveries climbing from about 20,000 vehicles in 2022 to roughly 49,000 in 2023, 90,000 in 2024, 135,000 in 2025 and about 251,000 in 2026.
Longer term, the deck put annual capacity at 365,000 vehicles and sketched a run-rate above 500,000 a year by 2030.
The reality has fallen short by an order of magnitude.
Lucid delivered 17,840 vehicles in all of 2025 — against the roughly 135,000 the presentation had projected for the year — and just 3,093 in the first quarter of 2026, down 42% year on year, after a 29-day halt to Gravity deliveries tied to a supplier defect.
That leaves Lucid selling at a small fraction of the quarter-million-vehicle pace it told investors it would reach this year.
People familiar with the matter framed the gap bluntly, describing an executive who helped draw up forecasts the market never supported and was later handed the task of meeting them.
That framing is contested, and Winterhoff was one of several figures — alongside Rawlinson and the former product chief Eric Bach — tied to the early strategy rather than its sole author.
Fifteen months in charge
Winterhoff’s path to the top ran through a boardroom upheaval.
Lucid named him interim CEO on February 25, 2025, after Chairman Turqi Alnowaiser forced out Rawlinson, the founder who had run the company since its earliest days.
Alnowaiser, a senior figure at Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund — Lucid‘s majority owner and financial lifeline — handed the heavily lossmaking carmaker to an executive who had never run one.
For the next 15 months, Winterhoff led the company without the permanent title, as a board search stretched well past a year.
By the production numbers, the interim tenure delivered.
Lucid nearly doubled annual output to 17,840 vehicles in 2025 from 9,029 a year earlier, expanded in Europe, opened on-road autonomous testing in California, and signed a $300 million robotaxi partnership with Uber and Nuro that became central to its pitch.
Winterhoff also set the 2026 agenda — guidance of 25,000 to 27,000 vehicles, the start of a midsize platform by year-end, and the first robotaxi deployments.
He used a March 2026 Investor Day to sketch a longer climb toward 100,000 vehicles a year by the end of the decade.
Volume bought with price cuts
The growth came at a cost the headline delivery figures did not show.
Much of Lucid‘s volume gain was driven by steep discounting rather than rising demand, with average selling prices sliding as incentives piled up.
People familiar with the matter said sales rose chiefly because Lucid cut prices, without a matching reduction in what each car cost to build.
The losses bore that out.
Lucid lost more than $1 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone and suspended its full-year delivery guidance.
In February 2026, Winterhoff ordered a 12% cut to the US salaried workforce that the company said would save roughly $500 million over three years.
He told CNBC at the time that the reduction was “nothing that will continue in the future” — a line the 18% cut announced weeks after his exit directly contradicts.
Passed over, then pushed out
The permanent job never came.
After a search that ran more than a year, Lucid named Silvio Napoli chief executive in April 2026, and he took over on June 1.
Winterhoff returned to the COO role he had held since joining, with a raised pay package — only for the board to eliminate the position three weeks later.
Days before the board moved, Winterhoff gave no public sign of what was coming.
In a mid-June post on LinkedIn, he celebrated the rollout of Lucid‘s 3.6 over-the-air update for the Gravity, writing that owner feedback had been “overwhelmingly positive” and that many owners had called the upgrade a breakthrough.
That post, among his last as a Lucid employee, landed the same week Emad Dlala, a longstanding Lucid vice president, announced his own departure.
Winterhoff’s exit marked the 16th departure of a C-level executive, senior vice president or vice president since October 2023.
A securities filing disclosed that Winterhoff would be eligible for benefits under Lucid‘s executive severance plan, and that the company had agreed to keep providing him “certain continued security support” and to let him retain his company vehicle.
The legal overhang
Winterhoff leaves with Lucid facing shareholder litigation that names him directly.
A securities class action filed in 2026 accuses the company and several executives of concealing a Gravity supplier defectthat forced the 29-day delivery halt, over a class period running from late February to mid-April 2026.
The complaint lists Winterhoff and the chief financial officer among the defendants, and the allegations have not been tested in court.
Separately, former product chief Eric Bach — forced out under Winterhoff in late 2025 — has sued Lucid for wrongful termination, a case that reaches into the same leadership decisions Winterhoff oversaw.
Neither case had reached trial as of Monday.
Lucid shares fell more than 66% during the roughly 14-month tenure of interim Chief Executive Marc Winterhoff, dropping from $26.10 at the time of his appointment in February 2025 to $8.80 when a permanent successor was appointed in April 2026.
As of press time, the stock was trading 3.5% lower at $5.18, leaving the company’s market value just above $2 billion.
