Lucid Motors just delayed its affordable EV. Now what?

Lucid Motors was just months away from releasing its most affordable electric vehicle yet, a crossover SUV called the Cosmos that was supposed to start under $50,000. But this week, the company pushed the release of the Cosmos back by almost a full year to the second half of 2027, part of an effort by its new CEO to avoid the quality problems that Lucid has suffered with its existing EVs.

It’s the latest setback for the company, which has struggled to find more than a niche customer base for its expensive, but technologically impressive, vehicles. And it’s one that CEO Silvio Napoli presented as necessary for the company to survive.

“While there is no question that Lucid brought leading innovations and outstanding products to the market, we have disappointed on several fronts, and for far too long,” Napoli said this week. “We have not executed consistently. We missed commitments, launched products before they were ready, underinvested in service, responded too slowly to quality issues, and allowed complexity to slow decisions down.”

Napoli’s sober assessment, which he offered on the company’s second-quarter earnings call, helps explain why he has taken an axe to the company’s leadership structure and overall workforce.

Multiple executives have left since he officially took over on June 1, including Senior Vice President of Finance Gagan Dhingra, whose departure was disclosed at the bottom of the company’s second-quarter financial filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday. Napoli has replaced those outgoing executives with an entirely new C-suite as he embarks on a cost-cutting mission aimed at achieving $1.4 billion in savings by the end of this year.

Napoli also cut 18% of Lucid’s overall workforce in June, following a 12% layoff earlier this year before he came on board. He canceled a second shift at Lucid’s factory in Arizona, citing lower demand for the company’s EVs — including its Gravity SUV, which has not taken off as the company expected despite being a more popular form factor than its first EV, the Air sedan.

The Cosmos had been seen by some as a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s supposed to be the first of several cars built on Lucid’s next-generation “mid-size” EV platform, which is smaller and cheaper to build. The much lower price tag is supposed to help Lucid attract more customers and reach higher sales volumes.

But Napoli seems worried that the upside of getting the Cosmos EV to market could be negated if Lucid doesn’t get the launch right.

Though he didn’t explicitly name the SUV, Napoli said on the call this week that he delayed Cosmos because he doesn’t want to run into the same kind of problems Lucid has had with previous vehicles, clearly referring to the Gravity.