Lucid cuts 12% staff to chase profitability

Lucid Motors is cutting 12% of its workforce as it tries to claw its way toward profitability. TechCrunch reports the layoffs were communicated in an internal memo from interim CEO Marc Winterhoff, framed as an effort to “improve operational effectiveness and optimize our resources.”

Notably, the cuts reportedly spare hourly workers in manufacturing, logistics, and quality. That’s a tell: Lucid’s problem is less “we can’t build cars at all” and more “we can’t afford the overhead required to become a real automaker.” If you’re still ramping production, you don’t fire the people turning bolts—you trim the expensive layers around them.

Lucid ended 2024 with about 6,800 full-time employees globally, TechCrunch notes, implying the reduction likely hits hundreds. The company is in the middle of ramping deliveries of the Gravity SUV, after early production and quality issues, and says it doubled 2024 output. It is also preparing a more affordable midsize EV expected to start around $50,000 later this year.

This is the EV “valley of death” in its purest form: capital expenditure, supplier constraints, and quality control collide with a market that no longer treats losses as a virtue. When cheap capital dries up, the engineering narrative (“the product is great”) suddenly has to answer to manufacturing yield, warranty risk, and cash burn.

Lucid’s leadership churn adds to the uncertainty. The company has gone almost a year without a permanent CEO after Peter Rawlinson abruptly resigned in February 2025, and TechCrunch notes additional executive turnover, including the departure of its chief engineer amid a lawsuit.

Lucid is also still selling a future beyond selling cars: it is collaborating with Uber and Nuro on a robotaxi service in the San Francisco area this year, TechCrunch reports. That may excite investors, but it also adds software and safety-validation obligations on top of a manufacturing ramp—two hard problems that rarely get easier when you’re laying people off.

This is not that EVs are doomed, but that “disruption” eventually meets unit economics. Tesla survived its early ramps by scaling production volume and relentlessly driving down costs; Chinese manufacturers built cost structures optimized for mass-market price points. Lucid is attempting to thread the needle from luxury volumes to mainstream pricing while still paying the startup tax.

The company will report 2025 financial results next week. The memo’s promise that layoffs “do not affect our strategy” is the kind of statement that usually means the strategy is about to be tested by arithmetic.