According to BusinessInsider, insiders revealed that Lucid, a US electric vehicle startup, told employees at an all-hands meeting on Tuesday that it plans to lay off about 1,300 people in the coming months, or 18% of its total workforce.
According to insiders and an internal memo issued after the meeting, Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson told employees that the company would cut about 18% of its workforce, and will communicate the details of the layoffs within the next three days. The layoffs will affect every organization and level of the company, including executives.
In an email from the company’s CEO Peter Rawlinson, this layoff will affect “nearly all departments and levels, including executives.” Rawlinson said that employees will learn more about the layoffs in the next three days, while regulatory filings show that the company plans to complete the restructuring by the end of the second quarter of 2023. According to the email, affected employees are expected to receive severance pay, including access to career resources, continued medical insurance, and accelerated stock equity allocation. Regulatory filings show that the company plans to spend about $24 million to $30 million on “costs associated with employee redeployment, severance, employee benefits, and equity-based compensation.”
For those who have been following Lucid, this layoff is not surprising. Rawlinson said the layoff is “consistent with the cost discipline we announced at the end of February,” when the company also announced it had spent about $2.6 billion during the 2022 fiscal year.
The company has also been working hard to produce and deliver cars. In February, the company reported having more than 28,000 pre-order reservations, but said it could only produce 10,000 to 14,000 cars during 2023. Nevertheless, this will still be a significant improvement as the company only produced 7,180 cars in 2022, delivering about 4,300 of them.
This week, the company suffered another blow, announcing the recall of about 600 vehicles to fix an issue that could cause the car to lose power.
Lucid is not the only automaker to conduct large-scale layoffs. In the past year, Ford has laid off about 3,000 people, General Motors has offered buyouts to many employees as part of a $2 billion budget cut, Stellantis has announced plans to close a factory, and Tesla has also conducted a round of layoffs. Other startups are also struggling, with Arrival cutting half of its workforce and Rivian cutting 6% of its workforce – twice.
