Lucid‘s new chief technology officer (CTO), Raja Ramana Macha, said in a LinkedIn post on Thursday that he had joined the EV maker this week, pledging in his first public comments to streamline engineering and sharpen execution.
His arrival is part of a sweeping leadership overhaul under new chief executive Silvio Napoli, who officially took office on the first day of June.
Macha is Lucid‘s first chief technology officer since founder Peter Rawlinson, who held the chief executive and technology titles together, stepped aside in early 2025.
Lucid announced the appointment on July 2, alongside second-quarter deliveries that fell short of expectations, saying Macha would join as chief technology officer with responsibility for its technology strategy and engineering execution.
He most recently served as Executive VP and CTO at the power-management group Eaton.
“This week, I had the privilege of joining Lucid Motors as Chief Technology Officer,” the CTO wrote. “From my first interactions with the team, one thing has been very clear: Lucid is home to extraordinary talent building phenomenal products.”
The appointment was one of several Napoli announced.
A Turnaround Team
Napoli, the former head of the elevator maker Schindler Group, cast the changes as a reset.
“We are building a new team who will transform the company,” he said, adding that the reorganisation aligned the company around customers, quality and innovation.
Alongside Macha, Lucid named Alexander De Bock, a restructuring specialist who had been chief financial officer of TI Automotive, as its incoming finance chief, replacing Taoufiq Boussaid, who will depart early next month after the second-quarter earnings call.
Billy Hayes, a veteran of Nissan and Stellantis, became chief customer officer with profit-and-loss responsibility across the US, the Middle East and Europe, and Hugo Martinho, another Schindler alumnus, joined as chief transformation officer to run a new business-process function.
Kay Stepper, previously at Bosch and Qualcomm, was named president of a new Lucid Technologies unit with control of robotaxis, AI, autonomy and driver-assistance systems, carving the company’s most advanced software work out from under the new chief technology officer.
Christian Appel, who had run production control at Lucid‘s Arizona factory, was promoted to vice president of program management, while Napoli also eliminated the chief operating officer role.
The overhaul is the most sweeping at Lucid since its 2021 stock-market listing.
Macha’s Background
Macha’s career spans automotive, software and heavy industry.
Before Eaton, where he led global innovation and technology across sectors that included automotive, he held senior roles at Schneider Electric and the industrial-software firm Invensys, and earlier at Tata Motors, where he led development of the Nano.
The ultra-low-cost Indian city car was once billed as the world’s cheapest. Macha oversaw production strategy across 28 manufacturing and sales sites.
On its leadership page, Lucid says the new CTO “leads product and engineering execution, with a focus on strengthening engineering excellence,” and describes his experience as spanning the automotive, software and industrial sectors.
He also sits on the board of Sasken Technologies, an Indian engineering-services firm, and holds an engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Roorkee and a management qualification from a business school in Pune.
In the LinkedIn post, Macha said his priority would be to “remove bottlenecks, strengthen value flow” and to help teams move with agility, efficiency and decisiveness.
“My commitment is to remove bottlenecks, strengthen value flow, and ensure teams have what they need to move with agility, efficiency, and decisiveness,” he wrote. “I couldn’t be more excited to build with this outstanding team and look forward to sharing more as we continue to push the limits of electric vehicle innovation!”
Macha added that he had been struck by the engineering behind the Gravity sport utility vehicle and by the Air Sapphire sedan, which he noted reaches 60 miles per hour from a standstill in 1.89 seconds.
That his career includes the Nano carries an echo at Lucid, which is counting on a cheaper, higher-volume model of its own to reach profitability.
Sixteen Departures Since Late 2023
Macha joins a company that has lost most of the leadership that took it public.
At least 16 senior executives have left Lucid since late 2023, spanning engineering, finance, manufacturing and legal, in a near-total turnover of its top ranks.
Rawlinson, who joined in 2013 and ran the company for more than a decade, gave up the combined chief executive and technology roles in February 2025 and became a strategic technical advisor to the chairman, leaving the technology brief effectively vacant until Macha arrived.
Chief operating officer Marc Winterhoff ran Lucid as interim chief executive for more than a year until Napoli was appointed, then returned to the COO role on June 1, before leaving the company within weeks.
EV first reported the departure and Lucid confirmed hours afterward, on the same day it announced cuts to its US workforce.
Others to leave include former chief financial officer Sherry House, product and engineering chief Eric Bach, and Emad Dlala, the powertrain leader who had absorbed much of the technology work after Rawlinson’s exit.
Design chief Derek Jenkins is now the only senior executive remaining from Lucid‘s founding leadership.
Pressure to Execute
The reshuffle lands amid mounting financial strain.
Lucid produced 4,774 vehicles and delivered 3,953 in the second quarter, below analyst expectations, taking its first-half total to roughly 7,000.
The company has cut about 18.0% of its workforce, some 1,600 jobs, withdrawn its full-year guidance and raised $750 million from Uber and its Saudi backers to fund the turnaround.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund remains the majority owner and has invested more than $9 billion since 2018.
The shares have fallen more than 90.0% from their 2021 peak, deepening the company’s reliance on that backing.
As of publication time, Lucid‘s shares were down about 3.0% at $6.26 in Friday’s pre-market session, having jumped 8.57% on Thursday to close at $6.46.
The Gravity, the larger SUV central to Lucid‘s volume plans, has undersold, and the company is trying to align production with demand by late 2026.
Full second-quarter financial results, including the closely watched cash burn, are due on August 4.
The Job Ahead
Lucid is preparing its make-or-break midsize Cosmos, its first model priced below $50,000 and its bid for higher volumes, to be built first at a new plant in Saudi Arabia before Arizona.
The Cosmos is the first of three planned midsize models that share most of their parts and is aimed at the mass-market segment led by the Tesla Model Y.
