- Lucid Motors announced yesterday that its CEO Peter Rawlinson has stepped down and will now serve as a technical advisor to the board.
- Marc Winterhoff, Lucid’s COO, will serve as the interim CEO while the automaker searches for a permanent leader.
- Lucid recently launched its second car, the Gravity SUV, and is developing a mid-sized platform that will spawn three new models starting in late 2026.
It has been an eventful start to 2025 for American EV startup Lucid Motors. Deliveries of its second model, the Gravity SUV, got underway earlier this year. Now, Lucid has announced that its CEO, Peter Rawlinson, has stepped down and will transition to become strategic technical advisor to the board. The company’s COO, Marc Winterhoff, has been named the interim CEO.
“Now that we have successfully launched the Lucid Gravity, I have decided it is finally the right time for me to step aside from my roles at Lucid,” Rawlinson said in a Lucid press release. Rawlinson served as the head of the startup for 12 years, presiding over the company’s renaming from Atieva to Lucid Motors in 2016 and leading the successful launch of the brand’s first vehicle, the Air sedan.
Curiously, Rawlinson was absent from the company’s fourth-quarter 2024 earnings call yesterday. When questioned about his absence, Winterhoff simply said, “Peter made the decision” to step back from day-to-day activities and “pass the baton.”
Winterhoff will lead Lucid while the company begins its search for a new CEO. Winterhoff will be tasked with continuing to ramp up Gravity production over the course of this year. Lucid plans to expand the range in late 2025 by adding a new Touring trim beneath the Grand Touring, the only version of the Gravity currently available. This will drop the Gravity’s starting price by $15,000, from $96,550 for the Grand Touring to $81,550 for the Touring.
Winterhoff will also oversee the continued development of the company’s new mid-sized platform. Lucid says this platform will spawn three vehicles, one of which it has teased already. This vehicle, an SUV, is expected to adopt the name Earth, and Rawlinson said last year that it would start at around $48,000. Another mid-size car will likely be a sedan to slot in under the Air, but it’s unclear what form the third vehicle will take.
The mid-sized Lucid SUV is expected to arrive in late 2026, and Winterhoff said on the earnings call that we could see an early version of the first mid-size model by the end of this year or the beginning of 2026. Winterhoff also mentioned the ongoing development of the “low-cost” Atlas drive unit, which will be utilized for its mid-sized vehicles.
Caleb Miller began blogging about cars at 13 years old, and he realized his dream of writing for a car magazine after graduating from Carnegie Mellon University and joining the Car and Driver team. He loves quirky and obscure autos, aiming to one day own something bizarre like a Nissan S-Cargo, and is an avid motorsports fan.
Source: Motor - aranddriver.com
