Lucid Motors doesn’t know how many electric cars it will build this year

Lucid Motors said Tuesday it is no longer sure how many electric vehicles it will build or sell this year, as it transitions to a new CEO and a company-wide cost-cutting push.

The company said in February that it plans to build between 25,000 and 27,000 cars this year. That’s a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of vehicles Lucid Motors estimated it would build and sell this year when it went public in 2021. But it would have been a significant rise from last year’s figure of about 18,000.

The change in Lucid’s guidance was announced during the company’s first-quarter earnings call by CFO Taoufik Boussaid. This comes just a few months after the company laid off 12% of its workforce, which TechCrunch first reported in February. Lucid Motors said in a filing Tuesday that these layoffs will cost the company about $40 million in the near term, though it believes the cuts will ultimately save up to $500 million over the next few years.

Boussaid said the decision to withdraw Lucid Motors’ guidance for this year was a “governance decision” and that incoming CEO Silvio Napoli is conducting a review of the business. Lucid Motors expects to provide a “full updated outlook” during its second-quarter earnings call in a few months, Boussaid said.

“It is clear that realizing Lucid’s full potential will require greater focus and consistent execution, especially around simplification, prioritization and speed,” Napoli said during the call.

Lucid Motors also shared on Tuesday that it had a worse-than-expected first quarter, largely due to a 29-day production outage and temporary sales halt that was the result of issues with its seat supplier. These issues have inflated Lucid Motors’ inventory, and the company said it will have to carefully manage production volume in the near term in order to reduce this glut.

“We are not constrained by capacity,” Boussaid said. “We are constrained by our discipline of not building inventory before demand. As market conditions evolve, we will expand production accordingly.”

All of this comes at a time when Lucid Motors is supposed to start building its first full-size car this year, at a price of less than $50,000. The company said it will begin production of the first electric car on this mid-sized platform by the end of 2026. On Tuesday, the company kept its focus on next year, saying it “remains…[s] On track to increase medium-sized production in 2027.

Lucid Motors also plans to launch a robo-taxi service with Uber and Nuru by the end of this year, using autonomous versions of its Gravity SUVs. Lucid confirmed Tuesday that it remains on track to start building road-ready versions of those vehicles in the fourth quarter.