Lucid has embarked on a seven-month, 42-city pop-up tour in the United States with the Air electric luxury sedan to raise awareness about its product.
Orders for the Lucid Air, which starts at $89,050 with shipping, aren’t meeting expectations, so the EV startup is trying to increase sales by going to places that aren’t exactly known as EV hot spots.
The Dream Ahead Tour started mid-April with four stops in Florida and will finish in mid-November in Dallas, with the pop-up events to offer test drives and information about Lucid’s proprietary EV technologies.
The roadshow is designed “to showcase the Lucid Air’s game-changing electric vehicle performance and technology,” the company said. It will also give US consumers the opportunity to experience and drive various Lucid Air models, including the 819-horsepower Air Grand Touring that offers 516 miles of EPA-estimated range and starts at $139,650 with shipping.
Lucid, which uses a direct-sales model, has 35 retail stores in North America, mostly in EV-friendly cities. The road tour will visit cities where EVs are not yet very popular, including Nashville (Tennessee), Birmingham (Alabama), Louisville (Kentucky), Jackson Hole (Wyoming), and Bozeman (Montana).
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The tour will also visit major cities with affluent buyers like Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, as well as The Hamptons in New York state. “Lucid’s pop-up activations will collect contact information from interested parties and share with sales for follow up,” a company spokesperson told Automotive News.
On Lucid’s Q4 2022 earnings call in February 2023, CEO Peter Rawlinson said the company’s focus is now on sales after ramping production. “We’ve got what I believe to be the very best product in the world and just too few people aware of not just the car but the company,” he said. “That is an entirely solvable problem.”
After struggling to fulfill more than 7,000 orders amid parts shortages, Lucid now has the opposite problem: not enough orders to keep the factory in Casa Grande, Arizona, running at capacity.
Lucid forecast production this year at between 10,000 and 14,000 cars, compared to 7,180 last year. The EV maker said in February that its order backlog for the Air sedan had fallen to 28,000 from 34,000 late last year.
In the first quarter of 2023, Lucid produced 2,314 Air sedans but only delivered 1,406. Both production and deliveries were down on Q4 2022, when the company built 3,493 units and delivered 1,932.
