Startup Lucid Motors is building the first phase of a $1 billion assembly plant near Phoenix, with other phases coming soon. Mike Boike, Lucid director of manufacturing, spoke with Los Angeles reporter Laurence Iliff.
Q: What are the next phases on plant construction?
A: We’ve finished up phase one and we’ve got test [car] bodies going through the factory now, with the start of production coming later this year. Right now, we’re actually completing engineering on phase two. We plan later this year to break ground on phase two already, with completion in 2023.
What does the next phase look like?
We originally planned to do 50,000 units with phase two. As we’ve grown and done our market analysis and Lucid has become more popular, we decided 50,000 wasn’t going to be enough. So, we had to expand to 90,000.
How many people will work at the factory under phase one?
We had estimated about 750 jobs for phase one. By the end of this year, with the amount of content we have decided to bring in-house, we are going to have about 1,500 people hired here by the end of the year.
Does that increase in jobs come from your vertical integration, such as building your own battery packs?
The charger, the inverter, the motors, the battery modules, the battery packs — doing all that work in-house is a competitive advantage in our mind, and we want to control that quality.
