Lucid has set out a $1.4 billion cash-flow improvement plan alongside second-quarter results, and in the process revised the timetable for its Saudi manufacturing plant. AMP-2 is now expected to be ready for production in early 2027 rather than starting full manufacturing in 2026, with midsize vehicle production in the second half of that year.
Lucid Group has pushed back the start of full vehicle manufacturing at its Saudi Arabian plant, telling investors that the King Abdullah Economic City facility will be ready for production in early 2027 and prepared to begin building its midsize models in the second half of that year.
The revision came alongside an operational reset announced on 4 August with the company's second-quarter results, under which Lucid is targeting roughly $1.4 billion of cash-flow improvement in 2026 through workforce reductions, lower production volumes, reduced capital spending and working-capital measures. The plan breaks down into approximately $600 million to $800 million from inventory reduction, around $500 million from capital expenditure and roughly $200 million from operating expenses.
In January, interim chief executive Marc Winterhoff had said the company was on track to begin full-scale manufacturing in Saudi Arabia during 2026, with a gradual ramp through 2027 and 2028 toward a full capacity of 150,000 vehicles a year in 2029. The revised schedule moves the starting point of that ramp by roughly a year.
What has not changed is the physical progress on site. Lucid says all buildings at the plant, known internally as AMP-2, are functional, and that manufacturing systems are being installed and tested across stamping, body, paint and final assembly ahead of production trials. That is the equipment set that distinguishes a manufacturing plant from what Lucid has been running in the Kingdom since September 2023 — a semi-knocked-down operation completing vehicles from kits shipped out of its Arizona factory at a rate of around 5,000 units a year.
The delay is therefore a commissioning and cash timing decision rather than a construction one. Bringing a greenfield body and paint shop into production is capital-intensive at precisely the point in the process where nothing is yet being sold, and Lucid is in the middle of a deliberate effort to stop spending ahead of demand.
The second-quarter numbers explain the pressure. Revenue rose 56 percent year on year to about $405 million, but gross margin was negative 105 percent and free cash flow was negative $1.476 billion. The company produced 4,774 vehicles and delivered 3,953, having deliberately moderated output to align production with expected deliveries, reduce inventory and preserve cash. It ended the quarter with $3.0 billion of total liquidity, which it says — together with financing secured recently — provides runway well into 2027.
Producing more vehicles than it delivers is the specific problem the reset is aimed at, and it is also the reason a manufacturing plant on the other side of the world is a difficult thing to accelerate. AMP-2 was conceived as the plant for Lucid's midsize platform, the lower-priced product line intended to move the company from niche volumes into something closer to a mass-market business. Until that platform is ready, additional capacity does not solve anything.
The company is also under new leadership. Silvio Napoli, previously chairman and chief executive of the Swiss elevator manufacturer Schindler Group, was named chief executive in April and took up the role on 1 June, ending a search that had run since Peter Rawlinson's departure in February 2025. Winterhoff, who held the post on an interim basis throughout, returned to his previous role as chief operating officer. Napoli's background is in industrial manufacturing at scale rather than in automotive, which is a reasonable reading of what Lucid's board judged the company's binding constraint to be.
For Saudi Arabia the revised timetable is a complication rather than a reversal. The Public Investment Fund is Lucid's majority shareholder, and the plant is the anchor of the Kingdom's automotive manufacturing programme — the first vehicle factory built in the country and, so far, the only source of Saudi-assembled cars on sale. A one-year shift in when it reaches full production changes the sequencing of local supplier contracts that depend on real volumes, and those contracts are the mechanism by which a component industry is supposed to form around the plant.
It also changes the arithmetic on the Kingdom's stated goal of manufacturing more than 300,000 vehicles a year by 2030. Lucid's 150,000-unit figure is the largest single component of the plants now under construction, and it was already scheduled to arrive in 2029 — leaving very little room for further slippage before the target year.
The company has not revised the 2029 capacity figure. It has simply moved the point at which the ramp begins, which for a plant of this size is the same as moving everything that follows.