Lucid opened its second manufacturing facility, AMP-2, in Saudi Arabia in September. In the more than two months since its opening the factory has assembled nearly 800 cars, all of which had already been built at its first factory in Arizona.
Lucid’s AMP-2 isn’t a car factory in the traditional sense of the word. Instead of building cars from the ground up, workers are re-assembling what the company called “Lucid Air vehicle kits” in its press release announcing the opening of AMP-2. Lucid said these kits were “pre-manufactured at the company’s U.S. AMP-1 Manufacturing Facility in Casa Grande, Arizona,” but these kits are actually Air sedans that were fully built.
In an interview with Reuters this week, Lucid’s Global Vice President and Middle East managing director Faisal Sultan revealed to create these kits the company takes apart Air sedans that were fully built in Arizona, and then ships them to Saudi Arabia, where workers put the car back together again.
“The car is fully built in Arizona … then it gets de-assembled… then the car gets shipped here as a kit, and that kit is then put back together,” Sultan told Reuters.
Currently the factory has a capacity for 5,000 cars per year. According to Sultan, workers at the factory are currently re-assembling between 16 to 20 Air sedans per day, with an accumulated total of nearly 800 since September. The low volume is intentional as Lucid says it is focused on training their employees.
“It [the Saudi factory] is a small operation for us. The reason why we have kept it this way is that we want to take baby steps in our approach of training people. You are doing roughly 16, 17 to 20 vehicles a day, rather than an hour, you can spend time with them to really train them,” said Sultan.
Lucid’s Saudi Arabian factory won’t stay like this forever. The company has a goal to transitioning the facility to building complete cars from the ground up by the middle of this decade, with an eventual goal of increasing the capacity to 150,000 vehicles per year.
