Lucid's CEO Admitted the Company Sometimes Did Not Know Where Its Cars Were

Lucid CEO Silvio Napoli admitted on the company's third-quarter earnings call that, as recently as this summer, the automaker "did not even know where cars were," Electrek reported.

Buyers placed orders, Lucid took up to two weeks to locate and deliver a car, and some of those buyers walked away. Napoli made the comment when an analyst asked whether Lucid's deliveries would go up or down in the fourth quarter. He said that at the start of the third quarter, the company had orders where it "would take sometimes two weeks to deliver to the customer, and so we would lose the order." He said Lucid now has visibility on which cars are being built, where they're shipped, where they're stored, and when they can reach a customer. A new commercial team also now sells the cars it knows are available on the day a customer wants one.

Electrek noted that this is a rough admission from a company sitting on thousands of unsold vehicles, and that Tesla ran into, and fixed, a similar inventory-visibility problem in 2018 at a much higher volume.

Thousands of unsold cars, and a $1.38 billion inventory

Lucid built 3,228 more vehicles than it delivered in the first half of 2026, including 5,500 built but only 3,093 delivered in the first quarter. Its inventory hit $1.38 billion on the balance sheet at the end of June, which is why Electrek reported earlier this year that Lucid had to adjust production after a bloated first-quarter inventory. So Lucid had thousands of cars on lots and in transit, and it was still losing buyers because it could not match a car to an order fast enough.

In the third quarter, Lucid cut production to 2,954 vehicles and delivered 3,806, down 7 percent year over year. Finished goods inventory fell by almost 15 percent during the quarter, according to new CFO Alexander De Bock. Inventory stood at $1.22 billion on Sept. 30, Electrek reported. Electrek also compared the episode to Tesla's 2018 "delivery logistics hell," when the company was making roughly 4,000 Model 3s a week and Elon Musk said Tesla faced an extreme shortage of car-carrier trailers. That comparison is historical context, not a claim that Lucid's volumes are similar. Lucid's own numbers are the ones to watch: a first-half build surplus, a third-quarter production cut, a 15 percent drop in finished goods, and a CEO on the record that the company lost orders because it could not find the cars.