East Bay company’s electric car charges closer to reality, deliveries to start in 2021
New York event to unveil more details of the Lucid Air
Lucid Motors, the Newarkbased electric car startup that has set up shop in Tesla’s backyard, is one step closer toward finally putting its first car on the market and into the hands of consumers.
The carmaker said this week that it will unveil the production version of its Lucid Air luxury sedan at an event in New York in April. Officials didn’t give any new details about the Lucid Air, but said pricing information, vehicle specifications and configurations will be revealed at the New York event.
The company is currently building and testing 80 prototypes of the Lucid Air at its
Newark facilities, and it said those vehicles are very similar to what it will eventually have on sale for the general public.
The company has been taking pre-orders for the Lucid Air since first announcing the vehicle in December 2016. Customers can visit Lucidmotors.com to put down a $1,000 deposit on a vehicle, and the company said it expects deliveries to begin in early 2021. A spokesman said the company isn’t disclosing any pre-order figures at this time.
Lucid has been growing rapidly over the last year. A spokesman said the company has gone from 175 employees in early 2019 to about 900 workers now, and it has plans to “aggressively hire” for positions in Newark, and at its plant in Casa Grande, Arizona. Lucid intends to move all of its vehicle production to its Casa Grande facility once the first phase of the plant’s construction is completed in the fourth quarter of this year.
Lucid originally planned to start production on the Lucid Air in 2018, but was delayed due to financing issues. The company received $1 billion in funding from the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia in 2018.