Lucid Motors is now producing 1,000 vehicles in some weeks as the company races to meet its reduced 2025 production target, interim Chief Executive Officer Marc Winterhoff said Wednesday.
At the 53rd Annual Nasdaq Investor Conference, Winterhoff detailed a series of disruptions that have challenged Lucid‘s production this year.
“I think the whole industry, but also particular for us, it was no shortage of challenges,” he said.
The CEO cited tariffs that forced the company to rethink its supply chain, followed by the unavailability of magnets from China as trade tensions escalated.
“The whole topic around unavailability of magnets out of China also cost us at least to make changes in our build plans,” Winterhoff explained. “We were actually able to still build the vehicles, but not to sell them when we want them because we had to change to vehicles that go to the kingdom, which then obviously a couple of weeks or months, actually longer on the boat.”
A fire at Lucid‘s largest aluminum supplier added further complications.
“On top of that, all of a sudden, our largest aluminum provider had a fire in one of their biggest plants where they do the aluminum for us,” Winterhoff said.
Despite the headwinds, the CEO said the company remains on track.
“Nevertheless, we are on track right now to get to our guidance,” he said. “We basically, in the last earnings call, we guided between 18 and 20,000. And we also said it’s going to be given the situation more on the lower end.”
“We have now have weeks where we are producing one thousand vehicles in a week,” Winterhoff said at the Conference held in London.
Assuming a weekly output average of 1,000 vehicles, that would represent a monthly total of about 4,000 units and a quarterly rate of 12,000.
As a reference, the company built 3,891 vehicles in the third quarter of the year at its Arizona plant, along with more than 1,000 partially assembled units shipped to its Saudi Arabia facility for final assembly.
The comments came hours after Winterhoff told Bloomberg in a separate interview that the company is “on a good track right now” but declined to confirm whether Lucid would hit its 18,000-unit target for the year.
“Well, I cannot say that right now, so we have to wait until we show the earnings at the end of the year,” he said in the Bloomberg interview, referring to early January when Lucid is expected to report fourth-quarter production and delivery figures.
Last week, the company’s CFO Taoufiq Boussaid stated that Lucid’s second model, the large SUV Gravity, will outsell the Air sedan for the first time, becoming the major driver of the new output record.
Lowered Guidance
Lucid started 2025 aiming to produce “approximately 20,000” units. In early August, the company reduced the target to a range of 18,000 to 20,000 units. By early November, the California-based manufacturer said it now expects to produce 18,000 vehicles.
Based on year-to-date production of 9,966 completed vehicles through September, Lucid needs to build 8,034 units in the fourth quarter to reach its 18,000-unit target — more than doubling the third-quarter pace.
Record Q4 Expected
Speaking at a UBS conference last week, Chief Financial Officer Taoufiq Boussaid said the fourth quarter will be a record for Lucid — despite the expiration of the $7,500 federal EV tax credit, which has sharply affected the industry.
Boussaid also noted that vehicles produced at Lucid‘s Saudi Arabia plant will not face tariffs on Chinese-imported parts that affect U.S.-manufactured vehicles.
Lucid does not publicly disclose delivery or sales targets.
