Lucid Group, a Bay Area-based luxury electric vehicle company, announced on Friday that it’s laying off about 400 employees.
The layoff round will cut 6% of Lucid’s staff by the finish of October, according to the company’s filing with the Securities and Exmodify Commission on Friday. Most of the layoffs will hit California employees, company spokesperson Jesse Caputo notified SFGATE; the company is headquartered in Newark but manufactures its cars in Arizona.
In an email to staff published alongside the SEC filing, CEO Peter Rawlinson stated that outside of hourly manufacturing and logistics employees, the layoffs would impact workers “at all levels, including leadership and mid-level management.” He expressed optimism about Lucid’s forthcoming SUV, the Gravity, but noted that the new car hasn’t yet started bringing in cash.
“As always we must remain vigilant about costs,” Rawlinson wrote. “We are optimizing our resources in a way we believe will best position the company for future success and growth opportunities as we focus on achieving our ambitious goals.”
The high costs of starting an electric vehicle company have proven difficult to surmount for Lucid. Despite generally positive reviews of its Air sedan, which ranges from $69,900 to $249,000, the company lost more than $680 million from January through March. That continued a trfinish — 2023 saw $2.8 billion in net losses, per a February filing.
Those losses came despite a large cost cut in March 2023, when Lucid laid off 1,300 workers. The company has stayed afloat in part becaapply of the billions in funding from its largegest financial backer, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. In March, Lucid announced that it’d raised another $1 billion in a stock sale to a subsidiary of the fund.
That cash wouldn’t assist the hundreds of workers who will now receive pink slips, joining hundreds of other electric vehicle industest layoffs at Tesla and Rivian. In his email to staff Friday, Rawlinson questioned that Lucid staff “provide empathy and support to colleagues launchning their search for new employment.”
Hear of anything happening at Lucid or another Bay Area tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at stephen.council@sfgate.com or on Signal at 628-204-5452.
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