Lucid Motors is elevating one other $1 billion from its largest monetary backer, Saudi Arabia, because it seems to be to blunt the excessive prices related to constructing and promoting its luxurious electrical sedan.
The corporate introduced in a Monday morning regulatory filing that Ayar Third Funding, an affiliate of Saudi Arabia’s Public Funding Fund, has agreed to buy $1 billion price of Lucid’s inventory, which is able to add to the Kingdom’s present stake of round 60% possession.
The contemporary funding comes just some weeks after Lucid advised traders that it only plans to build around 9,000 electric vehicles this 12 months, a slight bump over final 12 months’s output. It misplaced $2.8 billion in 2023 and completed the 12 months with simply shy of $1.4 billion in money and equivalents.
The corporate has struggled to seek out prepared consumers for its costly Air sedan, and has minimize costs a number of instances in current months in an effort to spice up gross sales. Lucid additionally plans to begin constructing its electrical Gravity SUV on the finish of this 12 months.
Lucid introduced the funding lower than three weeks after CEO Peter Rawlinson told the Financial Times that he was cautious of relying too closely on Saudi Arabia to maintain shoveling cash into its proverbial furnace. “If I undertake a mindset that there’s bottomless wealth from PIF, that could be very harmful, that’s one thing I’ll by no means do, I respect them far an excessive amount of for that,” Rawlinson mentioned on the time.
