Lucid Motors CEO Peter Rawlinson steps down

Lucid Motors is changing CEOs for the first time in nearly six years. The company announced Tuesday that Peter Rawlinson is stepping down from the CEO and CTO roles that he’s held since before the company went public.

Lucid appointed its chief operating officer Marc Winterhoff as its interim CEO. Rawlinson will serve as “strategic technical advisor” to Turqi Alnowaiser, who is chairman of the board and a top executive at Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund — Lucid’s majority owner.

The leadership change comes at a critical time for Lucid Motors, which just launched its Gravity SUV late last year. Lucid Motors has high hopes for the electric SUV, as the company’s first vehicle — the Air sedan — has struggled to come anywhere near the sales targets it once projected when it went public in 2021. The Gravity is still in the process of being slowly rolled out to early customers, employees, and other people close to the company.

“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 statement. “I am incredibly proud of the accomplishments the Lucid team have achieved together through my tenure of these past twelve years. We grew from a tiny company with a big ambition, to a widely recognized technological world leader in sustainable mobility.”

Rawlinson came to Lucid Motors in 2013 back when it was still known as Atieva, and was primarily focused on developing battery packs and other EV powertrain components. He had previously been employed at Tesla as the chief engineer of the Model S sedan — a fact that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly tried to obscure.

This story is developing…