A camouflaged Lucid Cosmos was photographed at the company’s Coolidge, Arizona, site on Wednesday, according to an aerial image shared on X by a drone operator who has documented Lucid‘s Arizona operations from the air since August 2024.
The photograph, which places the prototype at the former n manufacturing plant that Lucid bought out of bankruptcy last year.
The sighting comes as Lucid prepares to unveil the Cosmos, its first midsize sport utility vehicle (SUV), this summer, with no date set as of late Thursday.
Production is planned to begin at the company’s plant in Saudi Arabia by the end of the year.
A Sighting at the Former Nikola Plant
Earlier prototype sightings had clustered around Lucid‘s main factory in Casa Grande, Arizona, known internally as AMP-1, where a camouflaged Cosmos was photographed beside a Model Y in May, parked next to the Tesla it is built to challenge.
Cory Steuben, Lucid‘s Director of Cost Engineering, quote-reposted that photo with an eyes emoji, an apparent nod that the camouflaged car was a midsize prototype.
The Coolidge plant is a separate site, roughly 25 minutes from Casa Grande, that Lucid acquired in 2025 from Nikola, the electric-truck maker that collapsed into Chapter 11 after years of cash burn, recalls and the fraud conviction of its founder.
Lucid won Nikola’s assets at a bankruptcy auction that closed in April 2025, taking over the Coolidge manufacturing facility and Nikola‘s former Phoenix headquarters for about $30 million in cash and other consideration.
The deal added more than 884,000 square feet of manufacturing, warehousing, testing and development space, and the company extended job offers to more than 300 former Nikola employees.
The site came with vehicle-development and battery-testing equipment and a full-size chassis dynamometer, which Lucidfolded into its Arizona operations.
At the time, then-interim chief executive Marc Winterhoff cast the purchase as a way to expand capacity as the company prepared for its midsize platform vehicles.
The Make-or-Break Midsize
The Cosmos is the most consequential product in Lucid‘s pipeline.
Expected to be priced below $50,000, the crossover is the company’s first entry into the high-volume segment where the Tesla Model Y and the newly launched Rivian R2 compete, and its first model aimed beyond the Air sedan and Gravity SUV.
Lucid first showed the Cosmos behind closed doors at its Investor Day in March, displaying a finished design mockup and a body-in-white validation vehicle that confirmed factory tooling was already being tested.
Phones were confiscated before attendees entered the viewing area, and no exterior photographs were published.
The mockup, finished in red, was shown to Wall Street analysts and invited content creators, and Lucid presented it as “a near-final design,” InsideEVs reported.
InsideEVs, which viewed the car, described a short, rounded nose, lit Lucid badges at the front and rear, and the brand’s name set in wider, far larger lettering than on the Air or Gravity.
The car rides on an entirely new midsize platform and a new in-house drive unit the company calls Atlas.
Lucid has said the Cosmos uses an 800-volt architecture with a 69-kilowatt-hour battery delivering roughly 300 miles of range, reaches 60 miles per hour in 3.5 seconds in all-wheel-drive form, and carries a drag coefficient below 0.22.
The Cosmos supports bidirectional charging and can recover more than 200 miles of range in 14 minutes of fast charging, according to the company.
Lucid has set an efficiency target of about 4.5 miles per kilowatt-hour, a figure it says lets the Cosmos match rivals on range with a smaller, cheaper battery.
The vehicle is the first of three midsize models sharing about 95.0% of their parts.
The second, called Earth, is set to follow roughly a year later, with a third, adventure-focused model to come.
Uber has expanded a purchase commitment to at least 35,000 Lucid vehicles, a fleet that now spans the Gravity and the midsize platform.
Lucid released its first fresh visual of the Cosmos in April, a teaser posted as the banner image on the LinkedIn profile of newly appointed chief executive Silvio Napoli.
The full public debut remains scheduled for this summer, though the company has not named a date.
Saudi-First Production
Lucid plans to build the Cosmos first at AMP-2, its plant in Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Economic City, where the company recently hired a 30-year Ford manufacturing veteran to run operations.
The Saudi facility, the first car plant in the kingdom, is designed to scale to about 150,000 vehicles a year.
Production is set to start there by the end of 2026, followed by a slow ramp through 2027 and full capacity in 2028.
