Lucid Motors cuts 18% of workforce as new CEO dismantles second production shift

Lucid Motors is cutting 18 percent of its workforce, roughly 1,500 employees, just four months after the EV maker laid off 12 percent of its staff. The company said Monday that it has also eliminated the second production shift at its factory in Casa Grande, Arizona, and scrapped the chief operating officer role entirely.

The cuts are the first major move by Silvio Napoli, who took over as CEO in April after a 14-month search following the abrupt resignation of founder Peter Rawlinson in February 2025. Napoli, who spent nearly 31 years at Swiss elevator and escalator manufacturer Schindler and has no prior automotive experience, said the restructuring is meant to “simplify the company, sharpen execution, and position Lucid to become more competitive over time.”

Marc Winterhoff, who served as interim CEO for more than a year until Napoli’s arrival, has also left the company. Lucid had previously said Winterhoff would stay on as COO, but the regulatory filing confirms the position has been eliminated. Winterhoff will receive severance, security support, and gets to keep his company vehicle.

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The layoffs affect full-time employees, contractors, and hourly production workers. Lucid reported having 9,000 employees globally at the end of 2025, prior to the February cut that removed roughly 1,080 positions. The latest round takes the company to approximately 6,400 employees, less than half the headcount it would need to operate at the scale its original production targets implied.

Lucid said the restructuring will generate annualized savings of around 158 million dollars and expects the process to complete by the third quarter. The company will pay approximately 32 million dollars in severance.

The timing is notable because Lucid is preparing to launch its first mass-market vehicle later this year. The Cosmos SUV, which is expected to start under 50,000 dollars, is the vehicle Lucid has said will put it on a path to profitability by reaching buyers who cannot afford the 70,000-dollar-and-up Lucid Air sedan or Gravity SUV. Production is planned at Lucid’s factory in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund owns nearly 57 percent of Lucid and has repeatedly injected capital to keep the company running. The most recent round, a 550 million dollar Series C convertible preferred stock placement, closed in April and carries a nine percent compounding dividend, a sign of the increasingly expensive terms required to sustain the business.

The executive exodus adds to the instability. More than a dozen senior leaders have departed over the past two years, including Chief Engineer Eric Bach, who was let go in late 2025 and filed a wrongful termination lawsuit that has been stayed pending arbitration. Emad Dlala, a longtime employee promoted to a top role earlier this year, resigned in mid-June.

Lucid is simultaneously trying to become a player in the autonomous vehicle market. The company is partnering with Uber and Nuro on a luxury robotaxi service using the Lucid Gravity SUV, with employee testing already underway in San Francisco and a public launch planned for later this year. Uber has committed to buying at least 20,000 Gravity SUVs over the next six years.

The company declined to comment on whether any of its programmes are being mothballed as part of the restructuring. That silence is itself informative: when a company cutting nearly a fifth of its workforce will not say which projects survive, the autonomy programme and the Cosmos launch both carry more risk than the press release acknowledges.

Rivian laid off hundreds of workers last week, less than 2 percent of its workforce, a week after beginning R2 deliveries. The contrast in scale is stark: Rivian is trimming at the margins while expanding into mass-market production, whereas Lucid is making deep structural cuts while still searching for a viable production cadence.

The broader EV market in the United States has cooled significantly. At least a dozen electric vehicle models have been discontinued or paused in 2026 as tariffs, the loss of the federal tax credit, and import costs have reshaped the competitive landscape. Major automakers have pulled electric models from their product plans, and the surviving EV startups are all racing to cut costs faster than their cash reserves deplete.

Lucid delivered just 10,241 vehicles in 2025. The company has not disclosed updated production guidance for 2026 under Napoli’s leadership, and pulling the second shift at Casa Grande suggests near-term output will be lower, not higher. The factory was designed with capacity for up to 90,000 vehicles per year, a figure that now looks like it belongs to a different company.

The question facing Lucid is whether Napoli can execute a turnaround before the capital runs out. The Cosmos SUV is the clearest path to the kind of volume that could justify the Saudi investment, but launching a mass-market vehicle while simultaneously gutting the workforce and eliminating production capacity is an unusual sequence. Most automakers scale up before they scale down.

Lucid is doing the opposite, and betting that a smaller, cheaper operation can deliver what a larger, more expensive one could not.