Lucid Motors kicks off market debut with EV factory expansion plans

Lucid Group (formerly Lucid Motors) will be expanding its factory in Casa Grande, Arizona, by 2.7 million square feet, CEO Pete Rawlinson said Monday just hours after the company officially went public with a $4.5 billion injection of capital.

The company also said it has 11,000 paid reservations for its flagship luxury electric sedan, the Lucid Air.

Part of the expansion will be used to accommodate the manufacturing of Project Gravity, the mysterious title given to the automaker's forthcoming luxury electric SUV, a Lucid spokesman told TechCrunch. Not much is known about Gravity at this point, other than that it's scheduled to be available from 2023 and that it will use the same battery platform as the Air. Patent drawings submitted to the European Union Intellectual Property Office, first noticed by a member of the Lucid Forum, reveal little more than the renderings on Lucid's website.

The company is also planning on bringing more of the component production in-house, including major pieces such as the body panel stampings, the spokesman added. These parts were being handled by an external supplier.

The Casa Grande City Council approved the plans to expand the nearly 1 million-square-foot space in March. The first phase of the factory, which cost around $700 million to construct, went up in a record 12 months after breaking ground. Lucid has said that it wants to expand production capacity from around 30,000 vehicles per year to up to 400,000.

Lucid has had a long, sometimes tenuous road to the public market. The company first set its sights on bringing an electric sedan to production as early as 2018, but it quickly hit funding challenges that pushed this timeline further and further back. Lucid received major funding in 2018 with a $1 billion investment from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, which continued to be its largest shareholder throughout Lucid's merger with special purpose acquisition company Churchill Capital IV Corp.

That merger hit a bit of a hiccup last week when the company failed to garner a sufficient number of votes on a key proposal - likely due to the rise of retail traders and malfunctioning spam filters, executives said in an investor call.

Lucid, which will now operate under the name Lucid Group, is listed under the ticker symbol LCID.

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