Investors fled shares of EV startups Lucid, Lordstown, Nikola and Fisker after the EV startups reported worse-than-expected Q1 results and walked back production forecasts for the year.
Lucid told investors after missing Q1 revenue forecasts that it has enough cash to last to the second quarter of next year – not a bullish outlook. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, Lucid’s main shareholder, will be the decider as to Lucid’s future.
Fisker also cut its production output, blaming supply chain bottlenecks. The company had $652 million in cash as of March 31 after burning $79 million during the first quarter. (Fisker is not building its own factories, which helps.)
Lordstown and Nikola are in deeper trouble. Lordstown has warned it could seek bankruptcy protection and said it could stop building its electric pickups.
Struggling clean truck maker Nikola said it will temporarily stop building trucks, raised cash by selling its share of a joint venture with IVECO and said its recently acquired battery unit, Romeo Power, might have to be put through a bankruptcy restructuring.
Rivian stood out from the crowd by reaffirming its goal to build 50,000 electric delivery vans and adventure trucks this year and reporting better than expected revenue.
Still, Rivian lost $1.35 billion in the quarter, and its plan for the year is to lose $4.3 billion before taxes – or roughly $86,000 per vehicle if it hits the production target. That looks healthy compared to Lucid, which lost nearly $458,000 on average on each of the 1,406 cars it delivered during the first quarter.
Faraday Future raised $100 million through a debt sale, giving itself a few more feet of runway.
Here’s another way to look at the parlous state of the EV startup flock:
Tesla this week said it is now building 5,000 Model Y EVs a week at its factory in Austin, Texas. That means Tesla Texas will build more vehicles in two weeks than Lucid expects to assemble for the entire year.
Morgan Stanley estimated in a note Tuesday that Tesla could harvest nearly $47 billion through 2030 from electric vehicle production subsidies available through the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act.
Morgan Stanley focused on how much more that would be than legacy automakers GM and Ford will get. There’s even less available for EV startups producing at a fraction of Tesla’s scale.
