Lucid is a word that means clear-headed, which is why it’s downright hilarious that there’s a serially money-losing car company that calls itself that.
Word is that Lucid has had to delay the launch of its latest money-loser, the Cosmos – which is for (I am not making this up) upscale nurturers – until sometime next year after counting its losses so far this year. These amount to another $1 billion net loss for the second quarter of 2026. That’s on top of the $3.8 billion losses last year. Lucid stock has lost 96 percent of its value over the past five years.
More losses are surely coming, given there probably aren’t all that many upscale nurturers out there wanting to spend $50,000 – to start – on the Cosmos. Which, by the way, Lucid considers its first “mass market” vehicle.
This is a kind of barometer of what’s become of the “market” in this country. In a twisted way, the Cosmos – if it ever actually becomes available – would be “mass market” in that in we now have a “market” in which the average price paid for a new vehicle is $52,000. The Cosmos would thus be something of a bargain. If, that is, you don’t count the time cost or the depreciation cost (much higher with EVs, regardless of the brand) or the potential cost of being stuck with an orphaned car. That being a car without a parent company, the latter having gone out of business. More specifically, an orphaned car whose parent was never especially popular. I own a 50-year-old Pontiac and Pontiac hasn’t been around for 16 years (it went out of business back in 2010) but I haven’t had any problems finding necessary mechanical parts for it. It can sometimes be a challenge finding trim pieces – in my case, the center console for models with the manual transmission – but I can still go to AutoZone or O’Reilly’s and get oil filters, fan belts, gaskets and so on. In other words, the parts needed to keep it operational. Because Pontiac had a huge following, once – and so still does.
In 1979 alone, Pontiac sold 211,454 Firebirds. That was one of the brand’s available models that year. Add in the sales of models such as the Grand Prix and Bonneville, Grand Prix and Grand Am, Catalina and and Sunbird and the total comes to 907,423 Pontiacs that year. Over the past three years, Lucid has “sold” about 35,000 EVs – and lost money on each “sale.” (The words are placed within air-fingers quote marks to reflect the fact that Lucid lost money on each “sale.”)
What does Lucid have to offer that other device makers do not offer already? Lucid is just another Tesla in a different brown paper bag. Its chief “technology officer” (it has the same mouth feel as upscale nurturer) is Peter Rawlinson, who used to be the chief engineer over at Tesla. So he flocked on over to Lucid to engineer slightly different Teslas shaped like slightly different crossovers for trendsetting achievers and active explorers – as well as upscale nurturers.
Someone really ought to hit the marketing genius who came up with that with a ball peen hammer. Then again, maybe I – a GenX’er from another time – am unable to appreciate the genius of it. Perhaps there are tens of thousands of upscale nurturers and trendsetting achievers and active explorers out there who will want to buy a Lucid marketed on that basis. We do, after all, live in Buckle Up late-terminal stage America, where everyone under 40 grew up in strapped in “safety” seat. Perhaps people who grew up that way do see themselves as upscale nurturers.
I suppose we’ll have to wait and see – if there is anything to see.
Next year is still almost two quarters away. How many more billions will Lucid lose between now and then? Perhaps a better way to put it is: How many more rich idiots will bankroll these losses? Speaking of which. Did you know Lucid is majority owned by the Saudis – Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund – and that the car for upscale nurturers – the Cosmos – is to be built in Saudi Arabia?
If it does get built, upscale nurturers will probably end paying more than the $50,000 projected base price on account of Trump’s tariff-taxes on vehicles not made here in the Homeland. Also thanks to Trump, inflation is ramping up bigly again – and by 2027, the projected base price of $50,000 is likely to be . . . revised.
How much are upscale nurturers willing to pay $55k – or more – for a Tesla in a different brown paper bag? How many upscale nurturers are there?
And they ask me why I drink.
. . .
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“upscale nurturers” used to be MILFs. At my age their GILFs approaching GGILFs.
Where are the vehicles for “Anarchic Barbarians” and “Contumacious Individualists”? How about “Visionary Liberators”, “Radical Freethinkers” or even “Audacious Revelers”?
What exactly is an ‘upscale nurturer’? RG has already co-opted the term on behalf of females, so I guess men aren’t included. Some soccer moms might be part of that group, but probably not most of them. Upscale means serious money, and most of the wealthiest women in the world achieved their riches through divorce or inheritance, although no doubt there are plenty of women married to wealthy men who honor their vows and do their best to be great moms and wives.
Lucid is gambling on ‘the future is female’ – that’s the clear message. Is this a productive strategy, particularly in the long term?
https://basicsbybecca.com/blog/the-future-is-female
Hi cobble,
I used the definition that Doug DeMuro used which is basically married women who are well off with a couple of kids. Yes, soccer moms could be included in it. Serious money doesn’t drive their own cars, they have chauffeurs. The Lucid isn’t for them.
Based on Doug’s vlog the men were the “Trendsetting Achievers”. The guys who want the newest thing. The “Active Explorers” I got the impression were the more adventurous, younger, hippies. The avocado toast hiking crowd that included both genders.
That was just my opinion on watching it; others may think differently.
How many married women who are well off with a couple of kids are there in America? What does well off mean? Chatgpt guesstimates USA has about 70,000 private household chauffeurs. I doubt they’re all going to be driving Lucids, so probably not a good business model.
Why aren’t men considered to be nurturers of children?
Do you want men to be nurturers of children and the women the achievers, cobble? I feel I am in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” argument. I think most of us would agree that when we see the word “achiever” we think guy/man/dude. When we see “nurturer” we think gal/woman/dudette.
If you want to deliberate biological assessments and social conditioning I am happy to have that conversation.
As for statistics, “well off” is a net worth of about $775K-$2.5 million (per Google). That is roughly 24 million Americans or about 9% of the US public. It is a small audience that Lucid is trying to corner, but then again they only make EVs so I already question their marketing savvy and intelligence.
What I want is irrelevant. Dads in fact ARE nurturers of children, although their nurturing might be less of the soft and cuddly kind and more of the ‘boundaries’ and ‘hard life lessons’ sort (read Warren Farrell on that).
But what’s true is that society does not honor or even recognize the value of dads and considers them replaceable NPCs in the narcissistic progressive female drama of today, a complete reversal of times when social engineering was devoted to ensuring every kid had a dad.
I believe this is the fundamental error that will ultimately bring down western civ. Every kid in history had a mom, but only societies that ensured every kid had a dad rose to greatness.
Hey Cobblestones,
Regarding the blog…
That’s racist!
Also, much of that references college. Being female, especially in STEM subjects, opens up a whole cornucopia of scholarships and other opportunities in the modern college system. As a man, and especially as a man of European decent like me, you quickly learn that, for some reason, you are no longer valued in such settings. You’re a problem for the world, and you need your time in the trash-heap.
Then we wonder why today’s young men lack hope, self-respect and ambition.
P.S. The broad that wrote the article forgot to make bold the title of point #5:
“5. Females now outnumber males teaching on the college campus”
College is doing wonders for proofreading and consistency.
I actually do believe the future is indeed female, but it’s not going to play out the way such women believe. Young men are bowing out of the game, because fighting against women isn’t in the male genetic code and women have become toxic, not least because the state has weaponized them against men.
Bowing out means no marriage, no kids, no participating in the rat race, men disincentivized to the point they’ll just avoid women altogether, relax and go fishing, leaving women to run the power plants, build the sewage treatment centers and office towers, design the next great tech, repair that broken transmission, cut the lawn, fight and die in the wars, explore for new energy resources, fish for Alaska king crab on the high seas, erect electric transmission towers, et cetera. Wish them all the best in those endeavors.
It would be cheaper for Loose-id if they just bought every prospective customer a new ‘limmoneen’ instead of actually manufacturing and trying to sell their wheeled toy smartphones.
Amazon started in 1998, as an online bookseller. First profit was 2018, from a 600M dollar cloud services contract with the State Dept. How many more billions can Lucid lose? It’s fiat. It’s not ever going to run out. You’ll just have to suffer inflation for it. Streaming music acts make way more than artists who sold albums did. People who sold millions of albums drive for uber, while streaming artists who could not sell 50,000 units of packaged music if their lives depended on it are making millions from Youtube. Google owns youtube. Google is owned by the government.
For Lucid, its Saudi Arabia putting up the fiat. With streaming acts, its advertisers…whose owners got tons from from the CARES Act and other interventions and have a permanent lifeline to .gov, in exchange for paying ridiculously high advertising prices on videos few real people actually watch, on the government’s streaming platform.
The Amazon business model is totally the point.
The mistaken assumption being made is the market is somehow free and we’re in a capitalist system.
Neither is true.
The stock market exists to suck up digits on a ledger “capital” and tie it up in a way that it’s not obvious to the marks (spelled “investors”) they’re being fleeced.
The venture capitalists and fund managers will reward anyone saying the right words – sustainability, climate friendly, data aggregation – with as many digital chits they want as long as they keep saying those words. Those chits didn’t come from them. They came from the marks paychecks and the FED discount window and Congress. They don’t care one way or the other if the “investment” pays off. They just write a “sorry, we didn’t make our targets” email at year’s end and the marks bow their heads and say “Thank you for losing a little bit less than that other guy. Here’s another 10% of my labor put into a 401K.”
Amazon did it for decades, selling at a loss on each sale but making it up in volume, until they’d pushed every competitor out through bankruptcy. Once it was only them in a segment the selection got narrowed and prices went up.
Lucid’s exists to flush capital down the crapper. If it wasn’t for all these companies taking losses a lot more money would be freed up from the malinvestment but it would then be sloshing around the economy, making inflation an order of magnitude worse.
-anon
That’s a good look on the subject: “Unicorn companies.” It has One Horn with pointed direction. The first co. to monopolize an industry gets to (slow-rollout) tech, model & infrastructure which it rides upon. Its own method is loop-back (cybernetic).
If it’s to be electric, then it forces (or “inculcates”) culture and convenience to the prime autonomous transportation method.
I think Doug at Cars and Bids did a vlog on this recently. I am going to toss myself in the “Upscale Nurturers” spot per Doug’s description of it. I don’t know what is underneath the sheet of the Lucid, but it doesn’t look like a Porsche Cayenne Turbo.
Active Nurturers do not want EVs. Seriously, we have enough to remember. The last thing we want is having to remember to plug something else in. EV charging stations? Really? We don’t have enough time to stop and wait 45 minutes between grocery shopping, getting to work, the post office, the bank, and wherever we have to drop the kids off at. Sometimes, five minutes at the gas pump seems too long. Forty five minutes? No way.
Have auto manufacturers stopped asking customers what they want? Is this no longer done? Upscale Nurturers want V8s. We like to hear the sound of the engine when she starts. We like the jealousy that crosses the Minivan mom’s face that she knows our car can kick her car’s ass at any light in town. Do we need 450 HP? Probably not. Do we want 450 HP? Yes.
An Upscale Nurturer wants a flex car, the Lucid ain’t it.
Preach it, RG!
“Have auto manufacturers stopped asking customers what they want?
Of course they have. They’re too busy building what governments want.
Last month they were offering 0% loans for 72 months to move inventory. What a world! I see some of them around here. Can’t believe people are willing to take a chance on them. Just get a Tesla if you really need to have an EV. Even those are depreciating nightmares though.
The problem is there aren’t any “upscale nurturers” anymore, because the kids these days aren’t reproducing.
Between the housing bubble, “toxic masculinity” and video gamer INCELS no one is f***ing for fun these days. Add in a dash of computer generated anime, angry lesbian girls and couples investing millions in their pets instead of bassinets and no wonder Lucid can’t sell their crappy cars!
Lucid selling only electric turduckens doesn’t help their cause.
How many more billions is Rivian going to lose before the plant in Georgia opens?
Maybe we should ask Marjorie Taylor-Green before she leaves Congress. The last time I drove through her district about a year ago, it looked like all of the old carpet and furniture mills in Dalton had been repurposed to serve the EV grift.
The marketing MBA’s are destroying the minds of generations.
Remember, “vegan leather” is now a thing. How ’bout this, “Our seats have more hydrocarbons than our drivetrain!”
Make mine a double scotch…neat…
Hi Mark,
“Vegan leather” – LOL! Whatever happened to “fine Corinthian leather” as advertised by Ricardo Montalban?
Hi Mike.
Wait’ll they learn that some poor plant was brutally murdered for their seat, then they’ll be crying out for some “Rich Corinthian Leather”. Sadly Ricardo Montalban is no longer here. RIP 2009.
maybe they could say it was made from gentile foreskins. That would certainly appeal to at least one demographic.
There is leather and there is pleather. Wilson’s was bad enough. Pleather is just unacceptable.
Lucid: Upscale Nurturers.
Also known as soccer Moms.
It doesn’t matter about how much more expensive new cars will be in a couple of years if no one can afford to buy one. At a certain point a rusty Pinto for $5K makes a lot more sense than a $50K Lucid as the Pinto as long as it’s still running has hit max depreciation years ago that new car has at least a decade to go before it even comes close to that point.