elective.com — 2023-01-13
Automotive Industry
The US electric car manufacturer Lucid Motors has exceeded its most recent production target for 2022. With a strong final quarter, the target of 6,000 to 7,000 vehicles was even slightly exceeded.
After halving the target from 12,000 to 14,000 cars to 6,000 to 7,000 due to “exceptional supply chain and logistics challenges”, the company now reports that it has produced a total of 7,180 electric cars in 2022. However, only 4,369 vehicles were delivered in the full year.
In the fourth quarter of 2022, Lucid produced 3,493 vehicles and delivered 1,932. This means that Lucid produced 48% of all cars built in 2022 in the last quarter of 2022. With the production rate of the first three quarters, even the minimum target of 6,000 units would not have been achieved.
By comparison, Lucid managed to build 2,282 units of the Air in Q3, compared to only 1,405 electric sedans in the entire first half of 2022. Lucid did not differentiate production figures between Q1 and Q2; the Q1 annual report only mentioned 330 vehicles delivered, but no production figure.
Lucid does not explain how this huge increase in productivity came about in its brief announcement on production and delivery figures. As with Tesla, these announcements are extremely brief. Instead, the company refers to the conference call scheduled for 22 February, when the business figures for the fourth quarter and full year 2022 will be presented.
The difference between production and delivery is relatively high. In the fourth quarter, more than 1,500 vehicles built were not delivered. This can have several reasons – such as necessary rework on the vehicles already built or simply the logistics processes. With only one plant in the USA, in Arizona to be precise, it can sometimes take several weeks by truck, ship and rail for a produced car to reach a customer on another continent.