A camouflaged Lucid Cosmos prototype has been photographed on US Highway 101 south of San Jose, the first sighting of the midsize SUV in which the images themselves show a location outside Arizona.
A Reddit user posted four photos to the r/LUCID forum on Saturday under the title “Lucid Cosmo spotted on 101 between gilroy and San Jose.”
Road signs in three of the images identify the stretch as Morgan Hill, a city in Santa Clara County about 35 miles southeast of Lucid’s headquarters in Newark.
One sign reads “Downtown Morgan Hill,” an overhead gantry shows East Dunne Avenue and a third marks Exit 367 for Cochrane Road half a mile ahead.
The user did not say in the title when the photos were taken.
Confirmed California
Images shared on Instagram on September 24 showed a Cosmos prototype with a California plate, credited to a Bay Area photographer, without a stated location.
All earlier sightings with a known location were in Arizona, where Lucid builds its vehicles in Casa Grande and assembles Cosmos prototypes at a second site in Coolidge.
The Morgan Hill images are the first to carry visible evidence of the model on public roads in California. The prototype wears a California manufacturer plate, a type the state issues to carmakers for vehicles they operate.
What the Photos Show
The new images give a closer and clearer view of the rear and side than the September set.
The car is covered in the same style of black, white and grey camouflage, a pattern of letter-like shapes.
At the rear, the glass slopes steeply into a short tail, with a black rectangular panel across the centre of the tailgate. Thin red light strips sit at the outer corners, level with the base of that panel.
In profile, the roofline falls toward the rear in the manner of a coupe-style crossover, and the door handles sit flush with the body.
The prototype rides on black five-spoke wheels. Lucid has not released official exterior images of the vehicle.
The EU Filing
The clearest view of the car without camouflage comes from a design Lucid registered with the European Union Intellectual Property Office.
The design was applied for and registered on May 22 under Atieva Inc., Lucid’s former corporate name, and was published on June 15.
The filing, first reported by the Dutch outlet AutoWeek, carries no model name.
Its drawings show a compact crossover visibly smaller than the Gravity, with a roofline that slopes sharply from the B-pillar into a rear spoiler that partly obscures the rear window.
That matches the profile in the Morgan Hill photos, where the roof falls away behind the front doors and the tail ends in a short, high deck.
The drawings also show a slim full-width light bar across the front bumper, flanked by angular air intakes at the corners.
The front of the car is not visible in the new photos, which were all taken from behind or alongside.
Shown Only Behind Closed Doors
Lucid showed the Cosmos privately to invited media and analysts at its Investor Day in New York on March 12, after collecting their phones.
The first photo from a public road emerged in May, when a camouflaged prototype was pictured next to a Tesla Model Y near the Casa Grande factory.
Cory Steuben, Director of Cost Engineering at Lucid, reposted that image with an eyes emoji, signalling it was authentic.
Drone footage in July caught prototypes at the Coolidge site, a former Nikola plant.
On July 30, Kyle Conner, the founder of the channel Out of Spec, posted a photo of another prototype without giving a location.
Where the Program Stands
The Cosmos is the first model on Lucid’s midsize platform, an 800-volt architecture the company calls Atlas, and is meant to take the company into a lower price segment than the Air sedan and Gravity SUV.
The company told investors in March that a 69 kWh battery pack targets 300 miles of range, and that the performance version targets 0 to 60 mph in 3.5 seconds.
Lucid had targeted a reveal in the summer of 2026 and a start of production late this year.
Chief Executive Officer Silvio Napoli said on the second-quarter earnings call on August 4 that production would slip to “most likely the second half of ’27.”
The model will be built first at Lucid’s AMP-2 plant in Saudi Arabia, and the company has sent engineers from that plant to Arizona to train ahead of the start.
Lucid said in August that the program was in advanced testing, including crash certification, aerodynamic refinement and cold-weather evaluation in New Zealand.
“I had the opportunity to drive our latest Cosmos prototype at our Arizona test track last week,” Napoli said on the call.
“And I have to say, I came away extremely impressed,” he added.
Napoli later said in a television interview that the Cosmos will travel more than 400 miles on a charge, and Lucid has since described its figures as preliminary.
The company, which is backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, has not set a reveal date.
