Pinal County exploding with Electric Cars

By: Cromwell Schubarth, Silicon Valley Business Journal

Fresh from raising $4.4 billion by going public in a blank-check merger, California-based Lucid Group Inc. is ready to more than triple the size of its Arizona car factory.

“We’re accelerating our factory to accommodate increased volume. We’ve just started grading the site for a 2.7 million square-foot expansion,” CEO Peter Rawlinson told CNBC after ringing the opening bell on the Nasdaq exchange on Monday.

Lucid now has 999,000 square feet of factory in Casa Grande, south of Phoenix, where it is pushing to deliver its first electric vehicles. It has room there to eventually expand to 5.1 million square feet.

The first cars it makes there will be the “Dream” edition of the Air luxury sedan. With a starting price of $169,000, this top-of-the-line version of the Newark company’s EV is already sold out, with about 500 buyers lined up.