A camouflaged Lucid Cosmos was photographed testing on Thursday, as the company prepares to unveil its third model later this Summer.
Out of Spec founder Kyle Conner shared the picture on X without disclosing the exact location. Less than 24 hours earlier, the car reviewer collected a loaned Gravity Grand Touring from the company’s Newark, California headquarters.
Every previously reported Cosmos sighting has placed prototypes in Arizona, around the Casa Grande factory or the former Nikola plant in Coolidge, and a sighting elsewhere would be the first sign that testing has moved beyond the state.
Conner’s earlier post was geotagged to Newark, but nothing in the Cosmos post indicates the two images share a location.
Conner Expects a Delay
Asked in the replies whether Lucid had given any timeline for the Cosmos, Conner said no, and offered a reading of why.
With the company’s staff being refreshed, he wrote, he expected Lucid to take more time to refine the vehicle before release, adding that he did not think the company wanted “another Gravity buggy launch situation.”
Conner labelled the assessment as speculation.
The Gravity’s launch was troubled by hardware and software problems.
Former interim chief executive Marc Winterhoff told reporters in January that he had replaced the entire software leadership team, and a supplier defect later forced a 29-day halt to deliveries — which was first reported by EV.
Lucid has lost seventeen C-level executives, Senior Vice Presidents and Vice Presidents since October 2023, and replaced most of its remaining C-suite on July 2 under chief executive Silvio Napoli.
The seventeenth departure, reported exclusively by EV this week, has been neither confirmed nor denied by the company.
The Saudi-backed manufacturer has said since March that the Cosmos would be revealed this summer. No date had been announced as of Thursday.
Where the Prototypes Have Been
Sightings until now have clustered in Arizona.
A camouflaged Cosmos was photographed beside a previous-generation Tesla Model Y near Casa Grande in May, stopped at an intersection next to the vehicle it is built to challenge.
Cory Steuben, Lucid‘s Director of Cost Engineering, quote-reposted that photograph with an eyes emoji, an apparent acknowledgement that the car was a Cosmos prototype.
An aerial photograph placed another prototype at the former Nikola plant in Coolidge in mid-July, roughly 25 minutes from Casa Grande.
Lucid acquired that site at a bankruptcy auction closing in April 2025 for about $30 million, adding more than 884,000 square feet of manufacturing, warehousing and testing space along with a full-size chassis dynamometer.
What Lucid Has Shown
The company displayed the Cosmos behind closed doors at its Investor Day in New York on March 12, showing a finished design mockup in red alongside a body-in-white validation vehicle confirming that factory tooling was already being tested. Phones were confiscated and no exterior photographs were published.
Two silhouettes preceded that event and a third was shown during it.
In April, Lucid published a fresh teaser as the banner image on the LinkedIn profile of chief executive Silvio Napoli.
The clearest look came from a filing rather than the company.
Lucid registered the design with the European Union Intellectual Property Office on May 22, published on June 15 under Atieva Inc., its former corporate name — the first time the vehicle had appeared without concealment.
The Vehicle
Priced below $50,000 in the United States, the Cosmos is Lucid‘s first entry into the segment occupied by the Tesla Model Y and the Rivian R2.
The car uses an entirely new midsize platform and an in-house drive unit called Atlas, on an 800-volt architecture with a 69 kWh battery for roughly 300 miles of range.
Lucid quotes 0 to 60 mph in 3.5 seconds in all-wheel drive, a drag coefficient below 0.22, bidirectional charging, and more than 200 miles recovered in 14 minutes of fast charging.
The efficiency target is about 4.5 miles per kWh, which the company says lets the Cosmos match rivals on range from a smaller and cheaper battery. The underbody does not use gigacasting, a decision Steuben attributed to cost of ownership and insurance repairability.
The Cosmos is the first of three midsize models sharing about 95.0% of their parts, with a second called Earth expected roughly a year later. Uber has expanded a purchase commitment to at least 35,000 Lucid vehicles spanning the Gravity and the midsize platform.
The Window
Production is scheduled to begin at AMP-2 in Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Economic City by the end of 2026, with a slow ramp through 2027 and full capacity in 2028.
US production at Casa Grande is expected to follow six to twelve months later, and Europe receives the model in 2027.
The commercial case is visible in the current numbers. Air registrations fell to 846 in the second quarter on Cox Automotive figures, the lowest since the third quarter of 2022, while Lucid delivered 1,811 Gravity SUVs over the same period — registrations and deliveries being different measures.
Lucid reports second-quarter results on August 4.
