Lucid delays affordable Cosmos EV to 2027 amid CEO shake-up

Lucid Motors was just months away from releasing the Cosmos, its most affordable EV yet — a crossover SUV meant to start under $50,000 — before the company pushed the launch back by almost a full year, to the second half of 2027. It’s the latest setback for a company that has struggled to find more than a niche customer base for its expensive, technologically impressive vehicles, and CEO Silvio Napoli presented it as necessary for Lucid’s survival.

“While there is no question that Lucid brought leading innovations and outstanding products to the market, we have disappointed on several fronts, and for far too long,” Napoli said this week on the company’s second-quarter earnings call. That assessment helps explain why he has taken an axe to Lucid’s leadership and workforce since officially taking over June 1: multiple executives have left, including Senior Vice President of Finance Gagan Dhingra, whose departure was disclosed in Tuesday’s SEC filing, and Napoli has replaced them with an entirely new C-suite while pursuing $1.4 billion in cost savings by year-end. He also cut 18% of Lucid’s workforce in June, on top of a 12% layoff earlier in the year before he joined, and canceled a second shift at the company’s Arizona factory, citing lower demand for its EVs — including the Gravity SUV, which has not taken off as the company expected despite being a more popular form factor than Lucid’s first vehicle, the Air sedan.

The Cosmos was meant to be the first of several vehicles on a smaller, cheaper-to-build “mid-size” EV platform meant to help Lucid reach higher sales volumes. Though he didn’t explicitly name the SUV, Napoli said on the call that he delayed Cosmos because he doesn’t want to run into the kind of build-quality and software problems Lucid has had with previous vehicles — a clear reference to the Gravity, whose issues were serious enough that Napoli’s predecessor, interim CEO Marc Winterhoff, apologized to owners. “We will not repeat the mistakes of the past by bringing a product to market before it is ready,” Napoli said on the call.

The company said Tuesday it has “sufficient liquidity runway well into 2027,” but warned Wall Street analysts it will build and sell fewer vehicles this year than previously predicted; its stock price plummeted more than 15% on Wednesday. With Cosmos delayed, more attention now falls on Lucid’s robotaxi partnership with Uber and Nuro, which is supposed to launch by the end of this year and which Napoli called a “must-win project” for the company. Uber has ordered 10,000 Gravity SUVs to be retrofitted with Nuro’s self-driving technology, plus a further 25,000 robotaxis on Lucid’s mid-size platform, though those aren’t expected to enter production until late 2028.

Why it matters

Lucid is betting it can survive a lost year on its cheapest car by leaning on cost cuts and the Uber robotaxi deal — a bet that only pays off if Cosmos avoids the quality stumbles that have kept Lucid a niche player.