Production and Revenue Gap Is Exactly This Big Between Lucid and Tesla

The undisputed leader of this still relatively small bunch of carmakers is, of course, Tesla. In the 20 years it has been on the market, it managed to grow from a startup lost in a sea of other startups to a mammoth enterprise producing millions of vehicles per year. The others trail far, far behind, but a few of them appear to have what it takes to challenge Tesla’s supremacy.

Lucid Motors is one of those few, even if, when looking at the production and income figures for 2022 (released this week), it still seems incapable of ever catching up with Elon Musk’s company.

To address the elephant in the room first, we’ll remind you what Tesla said about its performance last year: the company made 1,369,611 vehicles in 2022 and delivered 1,313,851 of them.

And now a look at what Lucid was capable of doing. During the entire year, the California-based company was only able to produce 7,180 vehicles, of which just 4,369 have been delivered. That’s almost nothing compared to the Tesla giant, but for Lucid itself, it’s quite the accomplishment, as those numbers are a little higher than expected, which was at most 7,000 cars produced.

The pace seems to have picked up in the last quarter of 2022, when almost half of all Lucids made last year rolled off the lines. In all, the previous twelve months managed to land Lucid an annual revenue of $608 million. Compare that to Tesla’s $81.4 billion, and you have a perfect picture of the gap between the two.

Things might change, though, for Lucid in the coming years. It says its cars have been reserved by some 28,000 people so far. On top of that, there’s that contract of sorts with the government of Saudi Arabia that calls for the Middle Eastern country to buy no less than 100,000 vehicles over the next ten years.

That’s good news for the company, but bad for reservation holders. Lucid says the production target for next year is 10,000 to 14,000 vehicles. Assuming none of them will be made for Saudi Arabia (which is unlikely), at least half of all reservation holders will have to wait until 2024 to get their hands on their vehicles.

But, as a bit of good news, Lucid will probably not go bust this year. The company claims it ended last year’s fourth quarter “with approximately $4.9 billion total liquidity,” and that should be more than enough for it to fund its operations at least until 2024. Separately, if all 28,000 reservation holders keep their promise, that would translate into an extra $2.7 billion going into Lucid’s accounts.