Lucid is taking on a new approach in an attempt to try and sell their cars by setting up shop at a Supercharger station in California and offering Tesla owners test drives.
Tesla owner and developer of Tesla Console Ryan Zohoury was at the West Hollywood Supercharger this morning when a Lucid Air finished in Cosmos Silver was parked in a spot directly opposite the 8-stall Supercharger station. Not trying to be subtle with their intentions, the Air had decals on the side signaling it was a “Test Drive Car,” and the Lucid employee driving it was approaching Tesla owners to sign up for test drives.
In between trying to sign up Tesla owners, the Air was on display with its doors, frunk and trunk wide open, while taking up two parking spots in the process. In a discussion with Drive Tesla, Zohoury said that during his forty-five minute stay at the Supercharger no one signed up for a test drive, and no Tesla owners walked over to check out the electric sedan, so it appears this attempt was not very successful.
https://twitter.com/RyanZohoury/status/1654919270986575873
Lucid’s struggles to both produce and sell their cars is well known, having produced 7,180 units of their luxury Air Sedan, and sold 4,369, or just 60% of their annual production in 2022 and far off their original guidance of 20,000 deliveries. The problems continued into 2023 as the automaker produced 2,314 Air sedans and reported 1,406 deliveries in the first quarter, a decline of 33% for production and more than 27% for deliveries compared to Q4 2022.
The ongoing low production and sales figures have been paired with a declining number of reservations, indicating customers were cancelling their orders before finalizing them.
In contrast, Tesla produced 439,701 electric cars in 2022, while delivering 405,278, or 92% of them to new owners. Of those figures Tesla produced 20,614 Model S/X cars, which are more in line with Lucid’s offerings, and sold 17,147 of them.
After a disappointing 2022 and start to 2023, all eyes will be on Lucid on Monday when they report their first quarter financials.
