Lucid Motors has been hiring from Tesla and the Detroit incumbents over the last decade while losing talent to Rivian, robotaxi startups, electric aircraft and artificial intelligence.
A workforce dataset drawn from LinkedIn profiles maps that one-directional flow for the first time, turning a run of high-profile exits into a single picture: EV maker recruiting from the past and bleeding talent to the companies investors associate with the future.
Lucid‘s strategy head Claudia Gast resurfaced at General Motors as a deputy finance chief weeks after resigning.
The ADAS/AD Sensing and Lighting Electronics manager, Vaibhav Chadha, has recently left for Apple, while the North American sales leader decamped to the Jeff Bezos-backed EV start-up Slate.
As recently reported by EV, the number of Lucid‘s job vacancies was down about 76% in a year.
Lucid recruits its workers from one set of companies and loses them to another, a workforce dataset compiled from LinkedIn profiles by J Scott Hamilton shows.
Based on the dataset, Lucid draws engineers from the legacy industry and Tesla, and loses them to Rivian and the frontier of autonomy, electric aviation and artificial intelligence.
Imported From the Past
Across the five years the dataset covers, Lucid has been a net importer of talent from exactly the places its founders came from.
Tesla is the single largest source, supplying a net of 245 employees. Lucid‘s former chief executive Peter Rawlinson worked at Tesla over a decade ago.
Other companies include a net 72 from Ford, 71 from General Motors, 47 from Stellantis and 33 from the diesel-engine maker Cummins.
The second-largest single source, at 134, is Nikola, the bankrupt hydrogen-truck maker whose Arizona assets Lucid acquired in 2025.
The Saudi-backed EV maker said at the time it would take on more than 300 former Nikola workers across manufacturing, software and testing, and roughly 250 had joined its Casa Grande and Phoenix sites by mid-2025.
Exported to the Future
The outflow points the other way.
Lucid is now a net donor of talent to the autonomous-driving developer Zoox, losing a net 61; to the electric-aircraft maker Archer, 40; to the chipmaker and AI giant NVIDIA, 24; and to Apple, 31.
Most pointed of all, it is a net loser to Rivian, the rival it most resembles, which has pulled 152 of its people while sending back 120.
The Body Stays, the Brain Trust Goes
The dataset adds a structural detail that sharpens the exodus.
Engineering accounts for roughly half of Lucid‘s tracked workforce, and as a function it is the most insulated from the cuts, down about 6% from its peak against double-digit contractions in human resources, information technology and operations.
The engineering rank-and-file, in short, is being preserved. Its leadership is not.
Lucid has ousted its Product chief Eric Bach, lost several engineering vice-presidents and, this month, its engineering and software chief.
Of the pre-2024 senior team, only design chief Derek Jenkins remains after more than 15 senior level departures.
Three Hubs, One Paradox
The dataset’s geographic footprint carries a twist.
Lucid‘s workforce is overwhelmingly American and clusters around three sites: the Newark headquarters in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Casa Grande factory in Arizona, and an engineering base in Southfield, Michigan.
Yet the largest pool of alumni feeding the company is neither Arizona nor California but Michigan and the wider Detroit area, whose universities supply more of Lucid‘s staff than any other region.
Four Rounds of Cuts Since 2023
The current reduction is not the first. Lucid has carried out four formal workforce cuts since 2023.
About 1,300 jobs went in March 2023, roughly 18% of the company at the time, and around 400 more followed in May 2024, some 6%.
The carmaker then removed 12% of its US staff in February 2026, and the current round goes further still: a cut of about 18% to its US workforce (about 1,500 jobs), that EV first reported earlier this week
A deeper reduction in Europe is being considered, a person close to the matter told EV on Monday.
Lucid is weighing a cut of up to 40% to its loss-making European operation, which sells an average of about 1.5 vehicles a day, as it pivots to local distributors in place of the company-run showrooms and sales teams it has staffed in each market until now.
The EV maker employed about 3,900 people at the end of 2021 and 7,200 a year later, according to its securities filings.
Headcount then dipped to 6,500 in 2023, the year of the first cut, recovered to 6,800 in 2024, and reached a record 9,000 by the end of 2025, a near-tripling from 2021 driven by manufacturing and the Saudi Arabian build-out.
The two 2026 rounds, landing on those same salaried functions, are now pulling the figure back down.
Lucid said it expects $158 million in annual savings, with the cuts concentrated on the factory floor, given the cancellation of the second production shift.
