Lucid (LCID -1.26%) has the audacious goal of becoming a sustainably profitable electric vehicle (EV) company, like its competitor Tesla (TSLA 0.34%). There are multiple levels to the size of this goal, and all of them point to the same outcome a year from now. That's why only the most aggressive investors should be looking at Lucid today.
Lucid is making progress
It would be easy to be negative about Lucid, but the fact is that the upstart electric car company is making important progress as a business. For example, it delivered 38% more vehicles in the second quarter of 2025 than it did a year earlier. It dramatically improved the bottom line of its income statement, as well. But there are negatives in those positives.
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For example, the company only delivered 3,309 EVs in the second quarter. That's barely a rounding error for a company like Tesla, which delivered 384,122 vehicles. The legacy automakers, against which Lucid is also competing, have even larger businesses. One year won't fix Lucid's scale problem, even if it continues to grow its production.
Then there's the bottom line. Despite the improvement, Lucid still lost $0.28 a share in Q2 2025. That's better than the $0.34 per-share loss in the same quarter of 2024, but the company continues to bleed red ink onto its financial statements, and badly. Once again, that's not going to change in a year, given that the company is still spending heavily to ramp up its production.
Moving very slowly forward
So where will Lucid be in a year? Probably not very far from where it is today -- a money-losing EV start-up that is likely to be years away from turning a sustainable profit. Most investors will probably want to watch this one from the sidelines.
