Workers have already broken ground on the future site of a Lucid motors plant in Saudi Arabia, Khalid al-Falih said during a panel at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos this week.
The plant will be one of three assembly centers for Lucid, which seeks to compete with Tesla and others for market share in the next-generation electric vehicle market.
Lucid’s plant in Arizona.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund owns 61 percent of Lucid.
Lucid announced in March a $30 million lease agreement with developer Emaar Economic City for a plot of industrial land in the King Abdullah Economic City, near Jeddah, according to a report in Al Arabiya.
Last year, Lucid gave a sneak peak of its forthcoming Lucid Air Dream Edition to a small group of media representatives at its main factory in Casa Grande, Arizona. One of those media people, Chris Taylor from Mashable, gave the car a glowing review.
“This claim I will make,” Taylor wrote. “The Lucid Air is the future of cars.”
Based in Newark, California near Silicon Valley, Lucid Motors was founded in 2007 as Atieva by Bernard Tse, a former Tesla vice president and board member, and Sam Weng, a former exec at Oracle Corp and Redback Networks.
Lucid’s CEO and CTO is Peter Rawlinson, who is a former Vice President of Engineering at Tesla and Chief Engineer of the Model S.
The Saudi Arabian government in April announced that it had placed an order for between 50,000 and 100,000 electric vehicles from Lucid within the next ten years.
