Lucid’s $300 Million Uber Deal: Is This the Ultimate Buying Opportunity for Investors?

Electric vehicle maker Lucid just scored a massive $300 million partnership with Uber—and investors are scrambling to figure out what it means.

The Big Picture

This isn't just another corporate handshake. Uber commits to purchasing up to $300 million worth of Lucid vehicles over the next half-decade, locking in fleet expansion while Lucid gains a flagship B2B client. That's serious capital hitting the books.

Why It Matters

For a company that's been burning cash and battling production delays, a deal of this scale isn’t just revenue—it’s credibility. Uber doesn’t throw around nine-figure contracts for PR stunts. This signals confidence in Lucid’s ability to deliver, scale, and compete.

Market Reaction

Shares popped on the news—because of course they did. Wall Street loves a good headline, even if the real payoff is years down the road. Let's be real: most analysts won’t read past the press release, but the smart money is already modeling the long-term ripple effects.

Bottom Line

This deal could be the catalyst Lucid needs to break out of its startup phase and into serious automaker territory. Or—and here’s the cynical finance jab—it’s just another corporate partnership destined to be buried in a future earnings report footnote. Either way, $300 million buys a lot of attention.

The Uber deal looks great for Lucid

The deal looks like a good one for Lucid, for three reasons that I can see.

First, selling 20,000 vehicles isn't nothing. Even though it's over six years -- and even though the clock doesn't start running until the first one ships, likely late next year -- 20,000 vehicles is a nice piece of business for a company that delivered just 10,241 vehicles in 2024.

Second, placing the Gravity in Uber's planned luxury robotaxi service could have other benefits.

Lucid's Gravity SUV and Air sedan are excellent electric vehicles, in some ways the best EVs yet built by anyone, with superb batteries and advanced software. The company's challenge has always been getting affluent potential customers to try them. An upscale robotaxi service will give a lot of potential customers their first tastes of Lucid's quality and technology. If it's good, sales are likely to result.

Lucid expects to begin production of the Nuro-equipped self-driving Gravity SUVs for Uber by the end of 2026. Image source: Lucid.

Finally, that $300 million investment will be a welcome addition to Lucid's cash hoard, which totaled $3.6 billion (plus another roughly $1.3 billion in available credit lines) as of the end of the second quarter.

It seems like a good deal for Lucid, no? I certainly can't see anything in this deal to worry about. But Lucid's stock rally didn't last very long.

Why not? I think cash is a key part of that discussion.

The big concern that is holding back the stock

The key investor concern around Lucid always comes down to cash. Like any automaker of any size, Lucid uses a lot of cash -- but it doesn't yet generate enough cash to cover what it spends.

That isn't news, but here's why it has become more of a concern.

Lucid is working on a new range of models one size down from the Air and Gravity. Those "midsize" models, Lucid says, will be less expensive than current Lucids, making the company's technology available to a wider range of potential customers. Lucid expects to have the first of those new models in production by the end of 2026.

The hope is that those new models will sell well enough to carry Lucid to profitability. But developing new models requires cash -- lots of cash. Does Lucid have enough cash to get there?

The answer is "Maybe." Lucid's largest investor by far is Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, called the Public Investment Fund, or PIF. PIF owns about 60% of Lucid, and it has very DEEP pockets -- but no investor, no matter how deep their pockets, will throw good money after bad indefinitely.

Is Lucid stock a buy now?

My theory is that PIF will ensure that Lucid is funded at least until production of the new midsize models has scaled up -- say, by the end of 2027. If that theory holds, then Lucid's stock might be a cautious buy at current levels.

If you buy now, the stock is essentially a bet that Lucid's new models will be competitive and that they'll sell well enough to get the company to breakeven. That isn't a terrible bet, but it's far from a sure thing. Scale your investment accordingly.