Lucid Motors, a California-based company that manufactures luxury electric cars, is in deep trouble. Each vehicle sold resulted in a loss of over $227,000. One example among many. Profitable businesses look different.
If climate radicals have their way, future global transportation should be electrified as much as possible. Wishful thinking, especially since there is hardly any capacity to generate enough electricity for this. It is estimated that even in 2050, about two-thirds of cars worldwide will still run on gasoline and diesel. The share of electric vehicles in this will be about one fourth. Still, electric car producers have boomed in recent years.
One of these companies is California-based Lucid Motors, which specializes in manufacturing luxury electric cars. The four models were priced between $74,900 and $249,000. Proud prices. However, the company also suffered a net loss of $630.9 million in the third quarter. According to the Wall Street Journal, this equates to a loss of more than $277,000 per car sold.
As the US newspaper further reports, it is mainly money from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund that keeps the company afloat. The Saudi leadership has pledged to purchase a total of 100,000 vehicles from Lucid Motors over the next decade. But the question arises whether this will be enough to cover all the costs.
Plus, Lucid Motors isn’t the only manufacturer of electric vehicles that is spending money with this. Rivian, for example, lost $33,000 per vehicle sold in the second quarter of this year, according to one report. And as Report 24 previously reported, only Ford’s combustion engine division was able to salvage the traditional company’s balance sheet. Because Ford also spends a whopping $36,000 to sell each of its electric cars – and has to sell eight combustion engines for each of them to recoup the losses. However, Lucid Motors and Rivian cannot do this due to a lack of combustion engine production.
Looking at these figures the question arises whether these companies have backed the wrong horse. Tesla may be profitable (thanks to heavy investment and good marketing), but the break-even point still seems a long way off for most electric car producers. And in the absence of sufficient demand for electric vehicles (subsidy notwithstanding), things don’t look to get much better in the coming years.
(tags to translate)electric cars
