Lucid is hosting a big Lucid Investor Day event in New York this morning, and your humble The Morning Dump writer was invited to sit in on a day of discussion and announcements centered around the EV company’s path towards profitability. Will I get to see the new, midsize Lucid? That’s the hope.
I don’t think I’ve ever done a live blog version of The Morning Dump before. Doing a Live Blog in 2026 is already a questionable activity. It’s a little like taping songs off of the radio, which is a thing you technically can do although basically no one does. The Live Blog existed as the only real medium for quickly sharing news on the web for a couple of years until social media took over that role.
Social media is mostly trash now, so I’m going to give it a shot. I’m also going to do it in proper, linear order, as opposed to always putting the most recent news at the top. This is my little concession to readability.
6:55 AM: I’m On The Train And Honda Has Canceled All Its EV Plans, I Think
It’s already quite the day! I planned to make breakfast for my family and lunch my daughter before leaving, and even managed to get up at around 4:45 am in order to accomplish this. I was ahead! And then I quickly pulled up Honda’s big financial report to see if there was anything that might fit with a TMD centered around electrification. Oh boy!
Because of the way timezones work, Honda put out the news at the end of their day, which just happened to be around the time I woke up. The news is that Honda is canceling all of their new EVs planned for America. At least I hope that’s what the release said. Parsing releases before the sun comes up isn’t particularly fun.
I texted someone at Lucid with the news, and also an apology that I might look like crap since this was cutting into my shower time. His reply was:
“We’re continuing to power ahead…”
One less competitor!
7:57: Snacks Are Being Given Out, Presentation Is About To Begin
I arrived on time, somehow, and I’m now surrounded by coffee and snacks as we get ready to start. I think the big news, so far, is what was announced yesterday: CarPlay and AndroidAuto are being rolled out to Gravity customers via an OTA update.
8:05: AM Marc Winterhoff Is Here
It was confirmed to me earlier that there are two midsize vehicles coming out, once of which we’ll see today. There’s the Lucid Cosmos and then the Lucid Earth, with the Cosmos coming first (in proper Genesis order).
The pitch that I was given by our friendly Lucid PR person was that this was going to be like a group of great chefs attempting to open up a fast casual restaurant (think Danny Meyer and Steak Shack). Maybe slightly more humble ingredients, but the same sharp minds.
As you can see in the graphic above, the goal is to find margins in order to achieve profitability by “the late decade.” So not this year. Or next year. Maybe the year after. Not that Lucid is necessarily starting off bad, with the brag that it’s by far the #1 EV luxury sedan (ahead of the Tesla Model S) and, if it was put against all luxury sedans, it would be third behind the BMW 7-Series and Mercedes S-Class. The Gravity as well, at least relatively, is doing well.
As Winterhoff half-jokes, Lucid is the only company to have all of its cars on the Car And Driver 10 Best list for 2026. Sure, Lucid only has two vehicles, but those two vehicles are the best in their class at the moment.
So how is profitability achieved? The obvious ones are making the cars they currently sell cheaper to produce, and adding more affordable midsize vehicles. With the company’s Uber deal, it means more robotaxis, and Lucid wants to lead there. Finally, it sounds like Lucid is still committed to selling its vehicle software platform, similar to what Rivian did with Volkswagen.
8:31 AM: What Is This? A Lucid-Developed Robotaxi?
Ohhhhh cars under sheets. Everyone loves cars under sheets. But is that an Uber van? Just a rendering of what a concept could be, but this probably means that Lucid is looking to develop something that isn’t just a Gravity with a sensor suite.
8:39 AM: We Are Just At The Bottom Of The ‘Trough Of Disillusionment’
Erwin Raphael, SVP of Global Revenue at Lucid Motors, has the quote of the day when talking about what his projects are for the EV market going forward. Standing in front of a graphic showing the hype slowing down, he said the company is bullish, but admits “We are at the bottom of what we call the ‘Trough of Disillusionment.'” Damn, that’s good. I wish I’d have thought of that.
Quick note: Thanks to Alfa Romasochist For pointing out the hype cycle’s source.
8:51 AM: Ok, Here We Are, Talking About Midsize
Derek Jenkins, head of Design and Brand, is here to talk about the new midsize vehicles. You can hear him above on our live podcast.
9:23 AM: Here’s More On The Earth And Cosmos
Sorry for the break, I decided to break out what we know about the Lucid Cosmos and Lucid Earth, the first two vehicles on the Lucid midsize platform. The funniest moment, which you can see on our Instagram stories, is that a live demo of the new AI assistant didn’t work because the car is inside a building. It happens! They showed a video of the system working, It seems fine.
Here’s an image of the new Atlas drivetrain, which Lucid Emad Dalia says will be the most efficient and most cost effective EV system in the world (beating vehicles from China, US, and Europe).
9:39: Ah, The Drive Unit Works On Front And Rear
It’s all about “radical efficiency” for Earth and Cosmos, and what I thought was interesting was that the new Atlas drive unit can work in the front or rear, instead of having to develop different drive units.
9:45 AM: Winterhoff Is Back
I’m waiting to find out what these vehicles will cost and how much range we’ll get out of a battery (and the battery size).
9:54 AM: Break Time, Vehicle Will Start Under $50k
I got the vegan yogurt and, friends, I have regrets. I’m sitting next to Kyle from AutoGuide, and he noticed that one of the slides said the midsize will start under $50,000. So there you go.
10:16 AM: Lucid Will Sell Whole Platforms
I’m onto the next presentation, which is Kai Stepper, VP of Advanced Driving Systems, talking about robotaxis. As you can see above, Lucid sees this as a large market that could mean $300 billion of revenue and a need for 590,000 vehicles for markets outside of China.
Lucid plans to sell not only vehicles to companies like Uber, it plans to sell whole platforms to automakers that want them. Also buried in this presentation is the news that the Cosmos (at least in robotaxi trim) gets 4.5 miles per kWh, which is better even than the Gravity.
This is also better than the current popular robotaxi Jaguar iPace, because literally everything is. I didn’t realize how poor the Zeekr RT was, though some of this might be a difference in battery chemistry (Lucid wouldn’t tell me if Cosmos was NCM or LFP, but I’m guessing it’s NCM).
I can also use this to make a guess for range and size. Someone said earlier that the battery will be smaller than the 123 kWh battery currently found in the Gravity. This means that an 80 kWh battery would allow it to travel about 360 miles, which is smaller than the R2’s battery while offering more range.
L3 is apparently coming in 2028, and you’ll be able to pay $69 for Level 2++ on the Gravity and Air. I can’t wait for Jason to get upset about this.
10:44 AM: The Fireside Chat Is With Uber COO Andrew Macdonald
I will say, there is no fire here for this fireside chat.
Uber’s Andre Macdonald and Marc Winterhoff are talking about how the two companies are working together. It’s a “three-way” with Uber, Lucid, and Nuro (and the Saudi PIF looking on from the corner, I guess), and everyone seems happy at the moment.
“We want to go mass market, and to do that you need to bring the prices down,” explains Macdonald, in order achieve volume. “I’m excited about the development track of the midsize platform.”
Somewhat unsurprisingly, Uber is looking to make a deal to buy the Lucid midsize robotaxi platform.
10:49 AM: The Midsize Taxi Concept Is Called The Lunar, And It’s A Two-Seater
Much like the Telsa Cybercab, the Lunar Robotaxi concept is only a two-door. That’s weird. Why is everyone doing this? The goal for efficiency is even better than the regular midsize.
Again, this is just a concept, and my guess is that the real version will get windows and doors. Uber isn’t officially a buyer, yet, but it sounds like the goal is to make something Uber would want to buy.
11:01 AM: Now It’s The Investor Portion Of The Day
We’ve now moved onto the financials, and my row of autobloggers are all writing up the vehicles that were just launched and terms like “gross margin” have become white noise in the background. This isn’t necessarily an unreasonable view, as details are either light or have already been announced.
11:27 AM: Lunch!
I won’t be the first person to get food, but I’m sure not going to be the last.
11:31 AM: Not Lunch
It’s analyst Q&A time. The first question is a good one, which is how long will it take between Cosmos and Earth? The answer, from Winterhoff is that it’ll be “one year” from Cosmos to Earth, and that they will not be trim-levels, but two different vehicles built on the same platform.
2:04 PM: They Took My Phone So I Could See The Lucid Cosmos
A picture is worth 1,000 words, and they took my phone, so I cannot give you a picture. I have seen the new Cosmos and I am allowed to describe it. First, and this is important, it is red. It’s a little brighter than a Mazda Soul Red, but has a similar depth. It’s nice to see a Lucid in a color that isn’t gray, gray-green, green-gray, blue-gray, or gray-black.
If you like the way the Gravity looks, you’ll enjoy the way the Cosmos looks. In profile, it looks somewhat like a smaller, shorter gravity, including the rake of the DLO and the thick d-pillar that flows into the rear glass. Unusually for a car that isn’t outrageously expensive, there’s no trim around the frameless windows. The A-surface of the door blends straight into the window.
Up front, the single lightbar across is gone (designer Derek Jenkins explained that many other people have copied that), and instead there are split headlights on either side of a giant LUCID light up graphic, and another one on the rear (the light can be turned off). The rear itself is large and cavernous, with a large opening that’s almost GMC Envoy XUV sized, with an upper and lower window separated by a thin bar with an embedded CHIMSL.
Is there a frunk? It’s a Lucid, of course there’s a frunk. In the model they showed us the frunk seemed bigger-than-average, which matches the giant trunk space. Lucid is always obsessed with getting as much packaging into
The Lunar robotaxi concept that Lucid showed is similar from about the A-pillar forward. See the graphic above? Everything left of the red line gives you a rough idea of what it looks like.
2:24 PM: Ok, that’s done.
I hope this was valuable to you! I’m going to go grab a beer. Or a cookie. Or a cookie-flavored beer.
Only three minutes for lunch? Oof.
I loved the live blog format here, kudos for doing that on a long day.
“Atlas drivetrain”…? How dare they sully the name of America’s finest 5-cylinder engine.
Didn’t VW already do that by naming their “It’s fine, I guess?” crossover the Atlas? 😉
Atlas shrugged.
Lucid seems to be playing burn the Saudis money vs burning money from the sky. They had their own approach that ass similar to Tesla before now it’s appears to be just Tesla minus some crazy side projects. This obsession with a two seater autonomous cab has to stop. I could understand if it was VTOL but it’s land based. You could jam a 2nd row seat in make it a 4 passenger then maybe you have something.
Did Lucid have AI hallucinate these numbers? I mean, you have to promote confidence as a brand or else you won’t find people to support your efforts. But I mean, look at the first part of this news. Legacy OEM’s can’t hang, its gonna be hard to deliver for Lucid.
They do make a nice platform, and everyone who drives them, love them. Maybe if they try to position themselves as a Porsche for electric cars they could do well.
Ugh, some of our executives have started doing presentations in this style. It makes me cringe so hard I’m concerned I may implode and become a tiny singularity.
What a depressing timeline. The legacy companies have no interest in good EV’s while the pure EV companies making good EV’s are all run by or financially supporting very ethically challenged men. I suppose Rivian’s leader is the least worst of the bunch.
Lucid copied everything from the Tesla playbook except that part where you get a 10% stock price pop over non-existent products.
“There’s the Lucid Cosmos and then the Lucid Earth, with the Cosmos coming first (in proper Genesis order).”
Wouldn’t proper Genesis order be:
From Genesis to Revelation (1969)
Trespass (1970)
Nursery Cryme (1971)
Foxtrot (1972)
Selling England by the Pound (1973)
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974)
A Trick of the Tail (1976)
Wind & Wuthering (1976)
…And Then There Were Three… (1978)
Duke (1980)
Abacab (1981)
Genesis (1983)
Invisible Touch (1986)
We Can’t Dance (1991)
Calling All Stations (1997)
Derek Jenkins seems to be the Peter Gabriel of Lucid, a comparison I’ll bet both gents might find flattering.
Having your self-titled album be your *12th* album has to be some kind of record (no pun intended).
loooool
You may need to explain this chain to David
Sure, but Lucid would do well to avoid it, because that involves a general trend of each being progressively worse than everything produced prior.
But the Zeekr does have the sliding doors, which makes ingress and egress much easier for all passengers. Why Lucid are you so scared of the sliding doors?
I cannot fathom a scenario where the 2=seater taxi makes more financial sense over a 4 seater.
If there’s no driver, just do like trains and have 4 seats that face each other. Bump out the nose with a baggage area to help the aero.
Most Uber trips are with one or two people (I’m guessing). Two seater is cheaper to build, meaning less cash laid out at the beginning. Start with the widest use case and add the 4 door, 4 seat version (and maybe a van for larger groups) after you collect a bit of pocket money on the cheaper version to help fund the more expensive versions.
If you’re building it from scratch, then the cost difference can’t be enough to justify separate models. This isn’t a retrofit, this is a ground-up design.
Also, why does a 4 seater need 4 doors? Once you nix the driver requirement, you can design this thing however you please.
IMO, it’d be easier to build it out as a 4-seater, and then nix 2 seats for massive interior space in the “luxury” editions. One model, multiple uses. You can always take away, you can’t add.
Yes but additional seats cost more. Bigger vehicle equals more in raw materials like aluminum and steel and a bigger battery to move more weight. If it seats four you have to have 4 doors as regulations on taxi services require each passenger to have a way out. So you could have big sliding doors or something but, more cost there too.
We’re talking about a company with severe cash flow problems and lack of profitability. You might be right if this was an established car company with somewhat deeper pockets. They could (probably would) design for the best and highest profit use case first. But a smaller, scrappy company has to do more with less. So you build something that’s cheap and make money from that first to fund your bigger ideas.
If Uber can buy these little things and make money shuttling single business travelers to the airport every day then they are also more efficient than the big cube that can carry a group of bar hoppers every Fri and Sat night.
How do vans get away with being taxis if every passenger requires an exit? or limos for that matter?
If you’re trying to launch, it makes more sense to makes a vehicle with a broad use case as opposed to pigeon holing, hoping for a niche profit, no?
Like I said, I think you’re correct but only if you had the cash on hand for it. If you’re struggling to put the cash together to do anything, you look for a way to do something that can bring in cash to expand.
I think the taxi regs I was referring to apply to sedan type of taxis where you have to have access to a door to get out. Vans would qualify because you can reasonably shuffle over to the door and climb over people to get there. In a two door car (as we were discussing) or coupe with 4 seats and you’re stuck behind the driver and he can control if you get out or not is the situation I was thinking of where it would not be allowed. But any sort of door that followed the regs while having one or two doors for 4 passengers would probably still be more expensive than the way these guys are building their robots taxi. I assume that Tesla is trying the same formula lends some level of evidence to my theory on costs, even if Tesla would have deeper pockets than Lucid certainly. Someone is looking at data that says these two seaters are serving a large enough audience to make this make sense.
Interestingly, that is the regulation that killed the original VW Beetle. It was still being built in Mexico largely for taxi service but they passed laws because taxi drivers were extorting money from tourists before they would let them out. That law killed the market for the beetle or they might still be making it.
But again, without a driver, it’d be very easy to make 2 doors that all passengers can reach. Rear row faces forward, front row faces back, central door.
He is basically describing the Zoox. Designed from scratch as autonomous. It is basically a pod with wheels on each corner and two bench seats that face each other with a door on each side.
Real company with real cars driving customers around in Vegas and San Fran.
Yeah that doesn’t fit the Lucid ethos to me. They’re in a different market than Zoox.
And since all these new vehicles are sharing a platform I would still think they can do this more cost effectively even if there’s not a universal market in the taxi business for what they’re building.
I just see the business reasoning for going at it the way they are. Time will tell if it’s the correct move.
The only time I use Uber is when travelling, and when I travel it’s with my family, so it is always 3 people. Business travel can anywhere from 1 to 10s of people. I would think that 4-seats would be a pretty good sweet-spot to capture the lion’s share of travel needs.
The majority of my Uber rides have been while travelling for work, so It’s always been solo, except when I go on vacation with my significant other, then it’s two of us. I think I’ve booked an Uber for more than two people twice, both in Vegas.
Gotta love the optimism on L3+ driver systems. Big “flying cars only 5 years away” energy. Oh wait, the people promising both of those all run in the same SV circles, neat.
That and the knee in the robotaxi market size prediction remind me of the super-optomistic BEV adoption forecasts.
“As always, the growth will be explosive, and it will start the day after period I’m which I’m responsible for making accurate predictions.”
Tulips! TULIPS!
Another 2 seat robotaxi? I love leadership that is following a lunatic just because.
If these robotaxi companies insist on 1-row seating, why not at least make it a bench? Or Mclaren layout if they need bucket seats.
Can’t wait until an executive in a turtleneck walks out at the end and announces “just one more thing.”
Behold, the Lucid Asteroid! (Electric motorcycle/lawn mower combo.)
You are so close.
It was the Lucid Lunar!
The Hype Cycle is one of the best things Gartner has ever put out. It’s not an exact science by any means, but still very useful to remind yourself of how these things go.
Dumping The Morning Dump in the Morning?! Yer still a young go getter, managed to escape the wolverine on the train, and beat the Washington Post to updating their comics post. You’re not old till you stop rushing for anything. Not wisdom, more F it.
I really like the comma here. It allows me to read this as intended or as if Lucid was really beating around the bush and eventually explained how they plan to become profitable.
It’s also great if you move the comma around.
Lucid Explains How It’s Going To Be, Profitable Eventually.
Lucid Explains How It’s Going, To Be Profitable Eventually
Those are perfect. Lucid will eventually become profitable by letting people know how it’s going or, more menacingly, telling them how it’s going to be.
I think the juxtaposition of Honda pulling out while you’re headed to a Lucid event has made me realize something.
I pawed at a pair of Lucids for about an hour in their Boston showroom a couple weeks ago. They are very different cars. I can’t think of a Honda since the NSX that was as big a departure from ‘normal’ as either Lucid is. They just look and feel different from legacy cars. Rivian has that feel too.
Do I think that means success? Probably not. The world is too unstable right now. Big dollar EVs only survive for as long as the well off decide they survive. If the luxury items don’t keep them afloat long enough to bring more pedestrian cars to market, they’ll fail.
Legacy manufacturers can ride out rough times by leaning on strong markets, and cutting weak ones off like a dead tree limb. Their goal is to always have somewhere to hide. The Lucids of the world don’t have that luxury.
Should’ve figured out that whole “how to make money” part before lighting the match…
When it’s Other People’s Money, who cares? Burn, baby BURN!
I feel like this is one of the fundamental reasons automotive startups fail.
Startups in general. On a smaller scale, I went through it back in the dot-bomb era. Company I worked for merged with another company and went public, the original owners sold out and the new guys from the merger partner took the IPO money and went on a completely ridiculous spending spree to (unsuccessfully) “grow the business” until it was gone. The stock then crashed, the original owners bought it all back at pennies on the dollar and booted the new guys (and closed down the other company, LOL). And it went back to being the sleepy little software company it had been before, more-or-less. Just with about $20M burned in a bonfire over 2-3 years, though I think the original owners made out *handsomely* in the deal. We peons didn’t, though those of us from the before times kept out jobs. All the new hires got the boot.
Yeah – there’s lots of waste when the money numbers get big. Startups usually get bit by a combo of what they don’t know and hubris. I mean, we’re revolutionizing the industry because we’re visionaries, after all.
The other end of the horseshoe is businesses that metastasize. Kodak is always dinged for not seeing the promise in the digital photography tech they invented. That’s not what happened.
They saw the potential, but they didn’t see A BUSINESS in it.
Because by that point, Kodak was an industrial chemical company more than photography. And digital cameras, even with a printing sideline, was not going to replace that huge and threatened c ore business, and THAT is what they were trying so hard to replace.
They were not set up for a lot of smaller, specialized divisions that would add up to the one big earner – that’s inefficient and duplicative.
I think they sorta ran out of creativity, but it’s not like they didn’t try. They definitely didn’t move nimbly enough, but it wasn’t the black and white story.
ANYWAY.
If people want to set fire to a few million, I’d like one or two. Just spill some over here.
I’ll make a really nice podcast with some of it.
Too much vision or not enough – needs to be a happy medium in there somewhere.
I’m with you – slide some of the that startup cash over here! Though I definitely cannot complain AT ALL about the pay to actual work ratio of my job, even if these days I am forced to do datacenter BS that I don’t particularly enjoy a bit more often than I would prefer.
The “Trough of Disillusionment” comes from an analyst firm called Gartner. There’s a Wikipedia article for the Gartner Hype Cycle that summarizes it pretty well.
See also AI, currently passing the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and rapidly beginning to plummet…
Yes, thank you!
AI is going to crash like a 737-MAX with a software glitch. Which won’t end it, because it IS genuinely useful – just not as the be-all-end-all of everything, nor something worth putting absolutely cataclysmic amounts of money into without even knowing what you are going to DO with it, which is very much the case all over at the moment, including the quarter BILLION dollar “AI Factory” my company is installing for a hedge fund. But, got to make hay while the sun is blazing, the supernova (or black hole collapse) may be right around the corner.
As Ed Zitron says a lot – AI/LLMs are probably a nice little business generating a few tens of millions in return annually.
What we have now is just circular IOU passing and an absolute looming catastrophe.
No doubt about that at all. Though I think a few hundreds of millions is more like it. But hundreds of billions as is currently being spent – oh HELL no. The datacenter we are build out a floor of will likely be about $5B in total across all tenants when it is done. And that is just one of so, so, so many under construction, being planned, or being retrofitted for this.
I think the PR team dropped the ball on this one. The Lucid PR person said that this was going to be like a group of great chefs attempting to open up a fast casual restaurant and then served a buffet of snacks?
It should have been various breakfast sandwiches wrapped in Lucid wrappers, served by interns with Lucid aprons and hats on.
Nice 🙂
Swedish Chefs.
I’m much more a savoury breakfast fan over sweet.
The people who put together these breakfast bars need to really consider adding some snacking bacon.
You had me at bacon, granted that’s the last word. It allowed me to savor it.
Have you seen the price of bacon lately?
“They are eating the cats and dogs!”
“I planned to make breakfast for my family and launch my daughter before leaving”
Launch your daughter? Via rocket? Trebuchet? Springboard?
How’d the launch go?
Hopefuly with better success than Space X has..
Hah, I mean, hopefully she made it to school.
I’ll take a cheese danish please.
I’ll have a cream filled donut topped with chocolate and sprinkles.
Now I’ve got to go by the donut shop on the way home from work.