Lucid Motors is altering CEOs for the primary time in practically six years. The firm introduced Tuesday that Peter Rawlinson is stepping down from the CEO and CTO roles that he’s held since earlier than the corporate went public.
Lucid appointed its chief working officer Marc Winterhoff as its interim CEO. Rawlinson will function “strategic technical advisor” to Turqi Alnowaiser, who’s chairman of the board and a high government at Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund — Lucid’s majority proprietor.
The management change comes at a vital time for Lucid Motors, which simply launched its Gravity SUV late final yr. Lucid Motors has excessive hopes for the electrical SUV. The firm’s first car — the Air sedan — has struggled to return wherever close to the gross sales targets it as soon as projected when it went public in 2021. The Gravity remains to be within the means of being slowly rolled out to early prospects, workers, and different individuals near the corporate.
“Now that now we have efficiently launched the Lucid Gravity, I’ve determined it’s lastly the best time for me to step except for my roles at Lucid,” Rawlinson stated in a press release. “I’m extremely happy with the accomplishments the Lucid group have achieved collectively by my tenure of those previous twelve years. We grew from a tiny firm with an enormous ambition, to a widely known technological world chief in sustainable mobility.”
Rawlinson got here to Lucid Motors in 2013 again when it was nonetheless often known as Atieva, and was primarily centered on creating battery packs and different EV powertrain parts. He had beforehand been employed at Tesla because the chief engineer of the Model S sedan — a indisputable fact that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly tried to obscure.
Lucid introduced Rawlinson’s transition alongside its monetary outcomes for the fourth quarter of 2024, in addition to for the total yr.
The firm finally delivered 10,241 EVs throughout 2024, up from simply 6,001 in 2023. That generated $808 million in income, up from $595 million in 2023. But Lucid nonetheless misplaced a whopping $2.7 billion final yr. It misplaced $2.8 billion in 2023.
Lucid completed the yr with $1.6 billion in money and equivalents. It has repeatedly tapped Saudi Arabia for billions in funding all through 2024 to assist keep afloat till the launch of the Gravity — regardless of Rawlinson telling the Financial Times final March that he felt it was “harmful” to behave just like the Kingdom was a supply of “bottomless wealth.”
