Bad week for EV makers: Rivian to lay off 10% of workforce while Lucid struggles to find buyers

Electric vehicle makers are having a bad week. First up is Lucid Group, which announced Q4 2023 results yesterday. While the company produced and delivered 37% more vehicles in 2023 than it did in 2022, its 2024 outlook was pretty grim news to investors.

Lucid said its production guidance for 2024 was only 9,000 vehicles, suggesting the company is struggling to find buyers for its EVs. As TechCrunch notes, that’s just 10% of the 90,000 EVs the company predicted when it went public that it could make and sell in 2024.

Shares in Lucid (ticker: LCID) are currently down over 8.6% to $3.38 in premarket trading. That is a fraction of Lucid’s all-time high share price of over $52 per share in late 2021.

Competitor Rivian Automotive also announced its Q4 2023 results. While the company delivered 50,000 vehicles in 2023, it also reported a quarterly loss of $1.5 billion. Unfortunately, Rivian also announced it would lay off 10% of its salaried workers.

Rivan has 16,700 employees but it’s uncertain how many of those the company considers salaried, notes CNN, so the exact number of those laid off is not known. Announcing the layoffs, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe told employees in an email that the company’s “business is facing a challenging macroeconomic environment — including historically high interest rates and geopolitical uncertainty — and we need to make purposeful changes now to ensure our promising future.”

Rivian stock (ticker: RIVN) is currently trading down more than 16% in premarket to $12.88 a share. The company’s shares were trading at over $129 per share in late 2021.

While Lucid and Rivian shares are down on the news, investors don’t seem to be worrying too much that the companies’ struggles are a bad sign for competitor Tesla. As of the time of this writing, Tesla shares (ticker: TSLA) are roughly flat in premarket trading, sitting just above $195.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91034698/rivian-layoffs-2024-lucid-stock-price-bad-ev-week?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss