Lucid Motors, the Saudi-backed maker of luxury electric vehicles, will disclose how many of its California jobs are being cut in a state filing expected this week — after announcing a reduction of about 18% of its US workforce.
Lucid‘s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) — filed on Monday hours after EV first reported on the layoffs — carried only a single, company-wide number: a cut of about 18% of its US workforce.
The disclosure offered no site-by-site breakdown, no job titles and no count for its Newark headquarters.
That detail is due through a separate, legally mandated channel.
Under California’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, an employer conducting a mass layoff must file a WARN notice listing how many positions are affected, the job classifications involved, the worksite and whether the losses are permanent.
A change to the state’s law this year also requires the notice to set out what support the company will offer the workers it is letting go.
Lucid spokesperson Jesse Caputo told SFGate the company would file the notice on Monday afternoon.
The filing had not appeared in the Employment Development Department’s public WARN listing as of early Tuesday, though the agency publishes that report only twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
The filing will tell only part of the story.
The California notice will account for the Newark headquarters and other Bay Area roles, not the production cuts in Arizona.
Eliminating the second shift at the AMP-1 plant sits outside California’s statute, since Arizona has no equivalent law and defaults to the federal WARN process.
So the state notice, when it lands, will quantify the Bay Area toll alone, leaving the Arizona total to a separate federal filing.
Workers Learned From a Locked Screen
For some of the employees already swept up, the paperwork is beside the point.
They say the first sign they had been let go was not a call or an email, but the sudden loss of access to Lucid‘s systems — hours before any word reached them.
In accounts posted to the workplace platform Blind, laid-off staff described logging in to find themselves locked out of internal tools and work devices, then piecing together what had happened on their own.
The posts followed EV‘s exclusive report that Lucid had begun cutting about 18% of its US workforce, effective Monday.
One worker thanked the company, with heavy sarcasm, “for TEXTING us we’ve been laid off,” then described access to Teams and a work device vanishing around midnight, before any layoff meeting had been held.
A confirmation email arrived on Monday morning.
A second Lucid employee said their access was severed on a Sunday, while they were trying to catch up on work.
Both individual accounts were posted anonymously.
WARN rules are built around 60 days of advance warning, close to the opposite of what the Blind accounts describe.
Lucid‘s February cuts already drew scrutiny on that point, with at least one law firm opening a WARN Act investigation into whether affected workers received adequate notice.
A Cut That Reached the Factory Floor
Lucid confirmed the reduction in the SEC filing, which put annualised savings at about $158 million against roughly $32 million in cash charges.
“These are difficult decisions taken to align production with demand, reduce inventory, and adapt to declining market conditions,” Caputo said in a statement.
“They are part of a broader effort to simplify the company, sharpen execution, and position Lucid to become more competitive over time.”
For the first time, the cuts swept in hourly production staff and eliminated the second shift at the company’s AMP-1 plant in Arizona, its only US factory.
This round marks the fourth formal workforce reduction at Lucid since 2023 and the second this year, following a 12% cut in February.
Lucid shed roughly 1,300 jobs, about 18% of its staff, in March 2023, and around 400 more, or 6%, in May 2024, even as overall headcount swelled to a record of about 9,000 by the end of 2025 on heavy manufacturing and Saudi hiring.
Lucid is also weighing a far deeper reduction of up to 40% in its loss-making European operation, where it sells an average of about 1.5 vehicles a day.
The premium brand registered just 35 vehicles across Europe in May, EV‘s data show, leaving the region’s sales and service network heavily underused.
Even as US roles fall, the company has said it expects to add manufacturing workers in Saudi Arabia as it expands its plant there — a sign the earlier cuts had spared the factory floor until now.
The same SEC filing confirmed that Lucid had eliminated the chief operating officer role, pushing out Marc Winterhoff barely three weeks after he returned to it.
A Familiar Path for California’s EV Makers
Lucid is not the only pure-play EV maker in California to thin its ranks again and again in recent years.
Rivian, headquartered in Irvine, has carried out several rounds of job cuts of its own since 2022 with the latest round arriving earlier this month.
Both companies have leaned on outside capital to keep going, Lucid on Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and Rivian on a deepening alliance with Volkswagen.
Pressure From the Top Down
The cuts are unfolding under new Chief Executive Silvio Napoli, the former Schindler Group chief brought in to impose cost discipline as the company shifts from low-volume luxury sedans toward higher-volume models.
Hiring has collapsed in step, with open roles down about 76% from a year earlier.
Executive turnover has run alongside the cuts, including the recent departure of engineering and software chief Emad Dlala after nearly 11 years, and a steady drip of senior exits as talent leaves for rivals.
Lucid shares have slid to successive record lows in recent weeks, trading near $5 and leaving the company’s market value just above $2 billion.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which owns more than half the company, has underwritten the business through repeated capital raises.
Even as it trims, Lucid is leaning on an expanded robotaxi partnership with Uber, now covering at least 35,000 vehicles, as a route to the scale its showroom sales have never delivered.
The company is also defending a federal securities class action tied to a supplier defect that halted Gravity SUV deliveries for 29 days earlier this year.
A Workforce Already Strained
The cuts land on a staff that was lukewarm on its employer well before this week.
On Blind, Lucid carries a 2.9 rating out of five across about 520 reviews, with management scored at just 2.1 and both company culture and work-life balance at 2.4, according to the platform.
