Lucid Motors announced that the debut of its Lucid Air luxury electric car will be postponed until at least August of this year due to delays caused by COVID-19.
While the electric car was initially planned to be revealed in its production form during the New York Auto Show, the event has been moved postponed until late August. Similar auto shows such as the one in Geneva and in Detroit have been outright canceled to the pandemic.
While some automakers took to debuting their cars online regardless of lack of venue, such as BMW with their i4, Lucid has chosen to wait it out until the New York Auto Show gets back on track, hopefully later this year.
However, despite the pandemic Lucid Motors CEO Peter Rawlinson told the Silicon Valley Business Journal that the company is still moving forward and trying to operate as close to full strength as possible and is still looking to add people in the midst of current world events.
“Leading up to the rise of COVID-19, Lucid had grown to over 1,000 employees and we are maintaining this aggressive growth trajectory even now. We have worked with the HR team to maintain interview schedules for new-hire candidates while switching them to phone calls, and we are also moving forward on talent acquisition strategies.”
Additionally, he states that most of the work at their production facility in Casa Grande, Arizona has been well underway before the virus hit and there has not been a shortage of supplies for any planned production of the Air.
“Our supply chain remains totally committed and in a state of readiness for start of production for the Lucid Air. For the most part, tooling and machinery for the Lucid factory in Arizona was well underway before the current crisis.”
Finally, Rawlinson does assure us that Lucid Motors is doing well financially, stating:
“Lucid is in a sound financial position, and has the financing needed to take it to start of production for the Lucid Air,”
The Lucid Air looks to be one most promising electric cars to make its debut from a brand new company, aside from Rivian. The Air looks to be a fine competitor to German luxury brands, as well as the Tesla Model S which Rawlinson was the Chief Engineer of.
Given that Lucid was prepared to reveal the car at this time in the first place, it would have been nice to have some additional information revealed about the car, but given the state of the world, I assume that Lucid wanted to hold off when everything calmed down.
