Lucid Motors revealed its cutting its estimated full-year production number in half, down to 6,000 to 7,000 units after supply chain issues and, more importantly, production and logistics problems cropped up as production sped up.
Welcome to “production hell,” as Elon Musk, CEO of rival Tesla Inc., described the early stages of ramping production several years ago.
The company delivered a little more than 300 vehicles in the first quarter, and 679 in the second, according to Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson. However, as the company attempted to accelerate production speed, it began to run into a variety of issues.
The company initially predicted production numbers between 12,000 and 14,000 for 2022, but the “revised outlook guidance reflects the logistic challenges I described as we began scaling up, which exposed the immaturity of our logistics processes.”
Rawlinson said the company experienced sporadic shutdowns of its production line due to supply chain problems, but also faced problems accelerating its production line to build more vehicles. He cited the company initially couldn’t feed the correct parts to the line at the correct time and cadence. This affected build quality, he said.
