CASA GRANDE, Ariz. (Reuters) – Luxury electric car maker Lucid Group is on track to meet its production targets for 2022 and 2023 and is pushing to achieve this year’s goal of 577 vehicles, its chief executive said.
The California-based startup, which went public via a shell company this year, has secured $4.4 billion it needed until the end of next year but would not wait until then to raise more cash, Peter Rawlinson told Reuters.
“This is a capital intensive business,” he said, adding that the company was on track to achieve its production target of 20,000 vehicles in 2022 and 50,000 in 2023.
He said the latest funding “sees us through to the end of 2022. So it doesn’t see us right through to project Gravity,” a reference to the firm’s electric sport utility vehicle planned for release in late 2023.
“The balance sheet is okay till the end of next year. So we will not wait till the end of next year to raise money. That would be pretty crazy,” he said.
Lucid started production of its Lucid Air premium electric sedans at its Arizona factory on Tuesday, aiming to deliver the cars to customers in late October.
He said it was a “reasonable bet” that in a year’s time the industry’s chip shortage would ease, echoing comments made by Tesla’s Elon Musk who said last week that new semiconductor plants being built would mean the shortage was short term.
But Rawlinson said the company was redesigning one printed circuit board to avoid any problems that could affect the supply of one chip in the medium term. “We are undertaking risk mitigation actions now,” he said.
(Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin; Additional reporting by Heekyong Yang; Editing by Edmund Blair)
