Luxury EV Market: Lucid Motors vs Faraday Future

Most in the EV space have heard of luxury car maker Lucid Motors. The start-up’s cheapest offering starts at $69,900, with its highest-end vehicle, Air Sapphire, coming in at $249,000.

Lesser-known is Faraday Future Intelligent Electric, a California-based “pioneer of the Ultimate AI TechLuxury ultra spire market in the intelligent EV era.” If you’re not exactly sure what that means, it boils down to tech-loaded electric cars.

The brand’s only car, the FF 91 2.0, comes in three variations, with prices ranging from $249,00 to $309,000.

Both companies started out targeting higher-end consumers, but which one is making more headway?

Lucid and Faraday are targeting similar audiences: wealthy EV-lovers who want to ride in comfort and style.

Last year, Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson stressed the need to increase brand awareness, to the point that the company began tracking the metric. Lucid has done test drives at Saks Fifth Avenue locations, partnered with big names such as Four Seasons and even collaborated with other high-end car makers. While Rawlinson and his team don’t specify how they track brand awareness, he did say on the company’s Nov. 7 earnings call that it had reached “an all-time high.”

Lucid has built a solid customer base, as evidenced by its recent third-quarter report: a 90% increase in deliveries year-over-year, and 16% sequentially. The Lucid Air Sapphire won Top Gear’s 2024 Best Luxury EV, while the Lucid Air secured U.S. News and Report’s Best Luxury Electric Car. Previous years were also packed with awards and accolades.

Faraday, on the other hand, wants to disrupt the ultra-luxury car market with a new kind of vehicle. FF 91 and its variations come with lots of fancy add-ons: zero-gravity rear seats, mobile hotspots and tons of screens.

But the car’s selling point, or what Faraday has tried to make it, are its AI features. For an additional $14,900 per year, you can get aiHypercar+, which is described on the company website as a four-in-one tech package that includes the Hyper Multi-Vectoring torque system, Magic All-In-One suspension control, and the “3rd aiSpace System”, which includes three 5G modems, generative AI capabilities, and a driver assistance system “that aims to know you better than you know yourself.”

But between the two, which one is bringing in revenue? 

Comparing financial statements, as well as production/delivery numbers, between the two is a bit tricky: Lucid created its first prototype in 2016 and production began in 2021. Faraday, however, had a prototype in 2017 that didn’t enter production until last year.

In Q3, Lucid’s revenue jumped 45% year-over-year to $200 million, although its net loss increased 57% to $992 million. CFO Gagan Dhingra attributed the net loss increase to “higher stock waste compensation expense” and costs associated with the upcoming Gravity SUV launch.

On the production/delivery side, Lucid produced 1,805 vehicles and delivered 2,781. Year to date, the company has built 5,643 cars against an annual goal of 9,000.

During that same quarter, Faraday delivered a whopping…two cars. To some extent, this is by design. Faraday’s business model focuses on high-quality ultra-luxury, which tends to lend itself to fewer cars produced and limited runs. In its initial announcement of the FF 91 2.0 Futurist Alliance last year, leaders said production would be limited to 300, and the cars are seemingly built on demand. 

The hard financial data isn’t great, either. Revenue was so negligible that CFO Koti Meka made no mention of it during the Nov. 6 earnings report. The news wasn’t all bad: Operating expenses declined more than 90% year-over-year to $3.8 million. Quarterly net loss was $77 million, a $1.5 million improvement from last year.

Looking ahead, Meka said, Faraday is focused on efficiency and cost reduction alongside “disciplined investments.”

Speaking of looking ahead, Faraday and Lucid have similar strategies for the long-term: increasing their total addressable market. For both, this largely means making cheaper cars and widening the line-up.

Lucid is slightly ahead of Faraday on this front. The Gravity SUV, which starts at $94,900, is on track to enter production later this year. Late 2025 will see the introduction of a lower trim version, Grand Touring, for an estimated $79,900. Rawlinson and his team have also repeatedly teased an even cheaper, “high volume midsized platform” for 2026.

“We estimate the total addressable market [for the vehicle] to be about 30 times more than our market last year. This is our product, which we're targeting at about $48,000 to $50,000. And the vision is I'd love to sell $1 million of these a year,” he said.

Faraday Future isn’t far behind with the launch of Faraday X (FX), an “AI electric vehicle for everyone,” which was announced in late September.

While the main Faraday Future (FF) brand is still targeting that elusive “ultimate AI TechLuxury” market, FX is for the masses. The first two vehicles in the planned line up, FX 5 and FX 6, are expected to start at $20,000 and $30,000, respectively, and will come with range-extended and battery-electric powertrain options.

In a September press release about the new brand, the company said the two could “mutually empower each other” through FF’s product and brand strengths and FX’s large-scale sale potential.

On Nov. 13, the company announced it had signed definitive agreements with unnamed “top OEMs” to “jointly advance” the first phase of development for the vehicles. 

"By empowering the FX mass-market models with much of the Ultimate AI TechLuxury technologies, we hope to fill the gap in the U.S. mass market and bring AIEVs with extreme price-performance ratio to American users," said FF Global CEO Matthias Aydt in the release.

Max Ma, Global CEO of FX, said they hope the first vehicles will roll off the line by late 2025.

The share price for Faraday Future (Ticker: FFIE) has been on a decline for the past three months. After reporting earnings on Nov. 6, the share price rose a few cents to open at $1.88 per share. The share price now sits at $1.54, cutting the market capitalization to $71.6 million.

Lucid (Ticker: LCID) reported earnings after the bell on Nov. 7, and its stock price had a small boost, opening at $2.35 per share on Nov. 8. Since then, prices have dropped to $2.29 per share, putting Lucid’s market capitalization at $6.9 billion.