Lucid (LCID) CEO Silvio Napoli admitted on the company’s Q3 earnings call that, as recently as this summer, the automaker “did not even know where cars were.” Buyers placed orders, Lucid took up to two weeks to locate and deliver a car, and some of those buyers walked away.
That’s a rough admission from a company sitting on thousands of unsold vehicles. And it’s a problem Tesla ran into, and fixed, back in 2018 at more than ten times Lucid’s current volume.
Lucid lost sales with cars sitting in inventory
Napoli made the comment when an analyst asked whether Lucid’s deliveries would go up or down in the fourth quarter. He said that at the start of Q3, the company had orders where it “would take sometimes two weeks to deliver to the customer, and so we would lose the order.”
He said Lucid now has visibility on which cars are being built, where they’re shipped, where they’re stored, and when they can reach a customer. A new commercial team also now sells the cars it knows are available on the day a customer wants one.
Lucid built 3,228 more vehicles than it delivered in the first half of 2026, including 5,500 built but only 3,093 delivered in Q1. Its inventory hit $1.38 billion on the balance sheet at the end of June, which is why we reported earlier this year that Lucid had to adjust production after a bloated Q1 inventory.
So Lucid had thousands of cars on lots and in transit, and it was still losing buyers because it couldn’t match a car to an order fast enough.
In Q3, Lucid cut production to 2,954 vehicles and delivered 3,806, down 7% year over year. Finished goods inventory fell by almost 15% during the quarter, according to new CFO Alexander De Bock. Inventory stood at $1.22 billion on September 30.
Tesla went through “delivery logistics hell” in 2018
Tesla learned this lesson the hard way during the Model 3 ramp.
By Q3 2018, Tesla was making roughly 4,000 Model 3s per week. That’s more cars every week than Lucid delivers in a full quarter today. Deliveries tripled or quadrupled in some markets, and the bottleneck moved from the factory to the trucks.
Elon Musk tweeted in September 2018 that Tesla had “gone from production hell to delivery logistics hell.” A week later, he said Tesla was facing an “extreme shortage of car carrier trailers” and had started building its own car carriers to keep cars moving. Tesla also launched door-to-door delivery and asked existing owners to help at delivery centers.
It didn’t stop there. In November 2018, with the federal tax credit about to be cut in half for Tesla buyers, Musk said Tesla had bought trucking companies and locked in contracts with major haulers. Tesla moved cars east by truck instead of rail to cut weeks off transit times.
Tesla delivered 83,500 vehicles in Q3 2018, including 55,840 Model 3s, a record at the time.
Europe showed how fast a delivery fix matters
When Model 3 reached Europe in February 2019, the first ship docked at Zeebrugge in Belgium and Tesla immediately had trouble processing the cars at the port.
About a week after the first ship arrived, Tesla ended its contract with the company preparing Model 3s at the port and took over the work itself. The target was 3,000 cars per week coming through one port.
It worked. By March 2019, Tesla delivered more than 5,300 Model 3s in Norway alone, making it the best-selling car in the country by a wide margin. A car that’s sitting at a port or on a lot doesn’t make anyone money. Tesla treated delivery speed as a sales tool, not a back-office job.
We later learned from Musk himself that this “logistic hell” was almost the nail in Tesla’s coffin. The CEO said that Tesla was at the brink of bankruptcy at the time.
Electrek’s Take
This is one of the most embarrassing admissions we’ve heard on an earnings call, and credit to Napoli for saying it out loud. Most executives would have blamed “demand” and moved on.
But it explains a lot. Lucid’s problem has never been the cars. The Air and Gravity are excellent products. The problem has been everything around them: service, software, and now we learn, basic inventory tracking. When you’re spending about $273,000 for every car you deliver, losing a buyer because you can’t find their car two weeks after they ordered is brutal.
Tesla solved this at 4,000 Model 3s a week while fighting for its own survival. Lucid is moving fewer than 300 cars a week. This isn’t a hard problem at that scale. It’s a discipline problem, and Napoli is right to call it that.
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