Lucid Motors has a potential robotaxi partner for Europe

Lucid Motors has entered into a partnership with European mobility platform Bolt that could bring robotaxis made by the California company to the continent.

The two companies announced Thursday that Bolt “aims to deploy at least 25,000 fully autonomous vehicles” built on Lucid’s upcoming mid-size EV architecture, which is supposed to be smaller and cheaper than its current offerings.

The announcement follows a major restructuring at Lucid Motors under its new CEO, Silvio Napoli, who recently laid off nearly 20% of the company’s workforce and delayed the launch of the first vehicle to be built on the mid-size platform by almost a year to the second half of 2027.

Lucid Motors has yet to deploy a commercial robotaxi version of either of its two existing vehicles. The company has spent the last year working in partnership with Uber and autonomous vehicle firm Nuro to launch a robotaxi version of its Gravity SUV. That is supposed to happen by the end of 2026.

Napoli has said he believes the business of becoming a robotaxi provider would have margins that “vastly” exceed those of “the traditional retail model.”

Bolt intends to own and operate the fleet, according to a press release. The two companies “will work together from the product-development stage on an autonomous driving system (ADS)-ready vehicle platform,” it says.

The vehicles will use Nvidia’s autonomous vehicle compute and sensing architecture (called Hyperion), but the companies did not say which company (or companies) will provide the autonomous driving software. Lucid declined to offer any more information beyond what was in the press release.

No money has changed hands, and Bolt has not placed an order for the vehicles. There is also no public timeline for deployment — only that Bolt considers this a “major step toward” its “ambition of 100,000 autonomous vehicles on its platform by 2035.”

“Autonomous driving in Europe requires data, software, vehicles, and operations to work as one system built for European roads and regulation,” Markus Villig, founder and CEO of Bolt, said in a statement. “Lucid brings a world-class platform, and together, we will co-design the vehicle and software based on our data and more than a decade of operating experience across more than 850 cities. No one is better placed to operate autonomous mobility services efficiently at scale.”

Napoli, in a statement, said, “Bolt’s reach and operating expertise make it an ideal partner to scale autonomous mobility across Europe.”
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