Lucid Motors set a company record for deliveries in the first quarter of 2025, shipping 3,109 EVs to customers in North America, Europe, and Saudi Arabia. It appears that a new company car program and sales to rental fleets helped it get there.
According to a footnote in Lucid Motors’ latest regulatory filing, it sold the equivalent of around 300 cars to what it refers to as “rental companies” in the quarter. Nick Twork, a spokesperson for Lucid Motors, said in an email that despite the use of the term, the “vast majority” of the vehicles referred to in the footnote were sold to leasing companies and leased back to the automaker as part of a revamped company car program.
“As part of the normal course of business, we leverage fleet transactions whenever we see a good opportunity that is in the best interest of our business,” he said.
The first-quarter sales to leasing and rental companies allowed Lucid Motors to beat the number of cars it delivered in the fourth quarter of 2024 by 100 vehicles, marking the fifth consecutive quarter that the company’s deliveries increased. This is despite the fact that the beginning of the calendar year is often a tough stretch for automotive sales; industry leaders Tesla and Rivian, for instance, each saw dramatic drops in deliveries to start the year.
Lucid’s stretch of record quarters follows years of the company struggling to establish a market for its luxury sedan, the Air. The company has pinned high hopes on its first SUV, the Gravity, which it expects to ship in greater volumes in the second half of this year.
Interim CEO Marc Winterhoff celebrated the milestone at the beginning of the company’s earnings call last week. “Many of our customers continue to tell us that once they experience a Lucid, it’s hard to go back,” he said.
Parsing the numbers
It’s difficult to say exactly how many cars Lucid has sold to leasing and rental companies. The company declined to break down the numbers made available in its regulatory filings. To date, it has only reported the dollar value of vehicles sold in this way.
Lucid said in the first-quarter filing that it sold $27.2 million worth of vehicles to “rental companies” in the first quarter. Dividing Lucid’s revenue for the quarter ($235 million) by the deliveries (3,109) suggests the company’s average selling price in the period could be around $75,590, which implies it sold as many as around 360 EVs to rental and leasing companies.
Whatever the exact number, it seems to be an uptick. For reference, the company wrote that it sold $34.7 million worth of cars to rental companies in all of 2024. In a prior filing, Lucid said it sold $9.1 million worth in 2023.
While the sales may have helped the quarter’s delivery tally, they do not appear to have had an impact on how much money the company made.
Lucid says elsewhere in the regulatory filing that it does not immediately book revenue on the cars it sells to rental companies because it’s obligated to repurchase those vehicles at a later date. Lucid only books revenue at that point — and even then, it only books the difference between the initial sale price and a repurchase price agreed upon with the rental companies as revenue.
It’s no secret Lucid has been working with rental companies. The company announced in October 2024 that Germany-based Sixt was starting to use Lucid Airs in its fleet of rental vehicles. It also has a deal with Enterprise that has been less publicized. But until the latest regulatory filing, it’s been hard to quantify how much impact the rental sales were having on Lucid’s overall delivery figures.
Assessing the customer demand for Lucid’s vehicles is crucial because the company’s first EV, the Air, has struggled to live up to expectations for a number of reasons. The company started selling the Air in 2021 at a time when sedans had fallen out of fashion in North America. Lucid initially focused on the most expensive versions of the Air across the first two years of sales.
As those sales slowly climbed, Tesla began slashing prices on its own vehicles in an effort to maintain the growth it had promised Wall Street. Those price cuts caused a domino effect for other automakers selling EVs. By the time Lucid started shipping the most affordable version of its sedan — the Air Pure — in late 2023, it made multiple price cuts to keep sales competitive.
Former CEO Peter Rawlinson — who was replaced earlier this year after he stepped down from the role — said in 2023 that “[t]oo few people are aware of not just the car, but even the company.”
Winterhoff, the interim CEO, has said since he took over that he wants to beef up Lucid’s marketing efforts. The company spent $3.5 million on sales and marketing in the first quarter, and on last week’s call he said investors should expect that to increase.
