Lucid has confirmed it remains on track to begin full-scale manufacturing at its King Abdullah Economic City plant in 2026, moving beyond the semi-knocked-down assembly it has run since 2023. Ceer is scheduled to start commercial production in the fourth quarter, and the Hyundai-PIF joint venture expects its first vehicle in the same window. After four years of groundbreakings, the Saudi automotive sector is being measured on output.
Lucid's interim chief executive Marc Winterhoff has said the company remains on track to begin full-scale vehicle manufacturing in Saudi Arabia in 2026, telling Bloomberg in Riyadh that equipment is already being moved into the plant at King Abdullah Economic City. Speaking on the sidelines of the Future Minerals Forum, he said production would ramp gradually through 2027 and 2028 before reaching a full capacity of 150,000 vehicles a year in 2029.
The statement matters less for what it says about Lucid than for what it says about the calendar. Saudi Arabia has three licensed vehicle manufacturers, and every one of them has a production date inside the next twelve months. 2026 is the year the Kingdom's automotive programme stops being a construction story.
Lucid has been the only company selling vehicles built in Saudi Arabia since its plant opened in September 2023, and what it has been doing there is a long way short of manufacturing. The facility has operated a semi-knocked-down process, taking kits shipped from Lucid's Arizona plant and completing assembly at a rate of around 5,000 vehicles a year. Full manufacturing means moving stamping, body construction, paint and final assembly onto the site — a categorically different industrial operation, and the one that generates local supplier demand.
Ceer, the electric vehicle brand owned by the Public Investment Fund in a joint venture with Foxconn and licensing component technology from BMW, is scheduled to begin commercial production in the fourth quarter of 2026 at its own manufacturing complex at King Abdullah Economic City. The plant represents an investment of about $1.3 billion and is designed for 240,000 vehicles a year at full capacity. The initial line-up is two models, a sedan and an SUV.
The third is Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Middle East, a joint venture in which the Public Investment Fund holds 70 percent and Hyundai Motor Company 30 percent. It broke ground in May 2025 at the King Salman Automotive Cluster, also within King Abdullah Economic City, and is targeting its first vehicle in the fourth quarter of 2026 with annual output of 50,000 units. Unlike the other two it will build both internal combustion and electric vehicles, which makes it the only one of the three with a product mix matched to what the Saudi market actually buys today.
Three plants, one location. The concentration is deliberate. King Abdullah Economic City sits on the Red Sea north of Jeddah with port access, and clustering the OEMs there is the only realistic way to give component suppliers enough combined volume to justify building in the Kingdom. A single 50,000-unit plant does not support a local stamping or seating operation. Three plants with a combined nameplate capacity approaching 440,000 units, in the same industrial zone, begins to.
That is the theory the entire programme rests on, and it is why the government's stated goal is expressed in vehicles rather than in plants. The Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources has said the Kingdom is targeting more than 300,000 vehicles a year by 2030 from its licensed manufacturers, on the reasoning that domestic demand and the supplier ecosystem develop together.
What none of the three has yet demonstrated is a working supply chain. Saudi Arabia has no established tier-one component industry. Every seat, wiring harness, casting, stamping and piece of glass currently arrives from somewhere else, and the localisation programmes that are meant to change that run on timescales measured in years rather than quarters — Ceer's own target is to source 45 percent of vehicle materials and components from Saudi companies by 2034.
Ramping a plant while simultaneously standing up its supplier base is the hardest version of the problem. It is also the only version available, because there is no incumbent industry to inherit.
The other unresolved question is demand. Saudi Arabia is a large vehicle market by regional standards, but it is overwhelmingly a market for imported internal combustion vehicles, and two of the three new plants build only EVs. Lucid's Saudi output is intended for export as well as domestic sale; Ceer will need government fleet procurement and a domestic charging build-out to move volume in its early years. Hyundai's mixed powertrain line-up is the least exposed to that risk.
None of this is unusual for a country entering vehicle manufacturing from a standing start. What is unusual is the compression. Most national automotive industries were assembled over decades, typically starting with kit assembly for a foreign OEM and adding local content as suppliers matured. Saudi Arabia is attempting to arrive with three manufacturers, two of them new brands, inside a single production year.
By the end of 2026 the sector will have produced something measurable for the first time. That number, rather than the capacity figures, is what the strategy will be judged on.