Almost every major car company around the world is struggling to build cars fast enough right now. For brands like Chevrolet and Ford, that’s more of an inconvenience than it is for smaller brands like Lucid. The latter announced today that it would drastically cut back on production goals for this year as it deals with major supply chain issues.
The news comes directly from Lucid as a product of its fourth quarter and full-year 2021 financial results. Peter Rawlinson had many talking points but none as effectual to the brand’s stock price as the drop in production goals for 2022. Originally, Lucid had planned to build 20,000 units. Now, it’s between 30% and 40% less.
“Looking ahead, we’re updating our outlook for 2022 production to a range of 12,000 to 14,000 vehicles. This reflects the extraordinary supply chain and logistics challenges we’ve encountered and our unrelenting focus on delivering the highest-quality products. We remain confident in our ability to capture the tremendous opportunities ahead given our technology leadership and strong demand for our cars,” Rawlinson said.
Related: Jay Leno Gets His First Taste Of The 1,111-HP 2022 Lucid Air Dream Edition
While the CEO didn’t specify the chip shortage itself but automotive production is never easy and that’s just one more problem everyone is facing. Lucid had been beating the odds with great reviews and positive press lately.
And initially, that upbeat attitude was present today as Lucid stock saw an almost 10% bump to nearly $29 before the news of the production goal change came out. After that, it’s dropped as low as $24.92 as of this writing. Of course, focusing on quality assurance could be something that continues to differentiate Lucid from other EV brands like Tesla which are often called out for poor quality control.
Despite the setback, Lucid seems like it’s full steam ahead on plans to increase its footprint. A new manufacturing facility was just announced and will be built in the brand’s home of Saudi Arabia. In addition, they plan to hire more workers here in the USA while they try to keep production numbers as high as possible. Of course, only time will tell whether or not the EV maker can overcome these hurdles or if it’ll get tripped up by them.