Exclusive / Lucid Motors’ Marc Winterhoff on tariffs, H-1Bs, and staying out of China

Lucid Motors touches a lot of live wires in the 2025 economy: chips, AI, tariffs, industrial manufacturing, luxury spending, consumers’ views on Elon Musk, and the burgeoning but complicated ties between the US and the Gulf. For now, the job of managing those tides belongs to Marc Winterhoff, who has been serving as interim CEO since February. A German former industry consultant, he’s a trains-on-time replacement for Peter Rawlinson, a design-obsessed car engineer who oversaw the launch of Lucid’s first models and brought in the Saudi sovereign wealth fund as a majority shareholder but struggled to get chassis off the assembly line.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Liz Hoffman: How have tariffs impacted Lucid?

Marc Winterhoff: Well, at one point, we were about to run out of magnets. China was slow-walking all of the export licenses. We were able to manage around it, but it cost us a lot of effort. Our engineers had to do a lot of extra work. We opened other suppliers — we have an Australian supplier we are working with — and we’re also expediting our project to get away from the rare earth magnets. If you, one day to the other, shift your build plan — [I don’t know] how much you know about the automotive industry, but it’s not that easy. We have 3,000 parts in a car; if one is missing, we don’t build the car. We problem-solved until the end of this year, and now we have added another shift in the plant for all of Q4 in Arizona, in order to get to the numbers that we want to get to.

Do you worry at all about the immigration crackdown at the Arizona plant, seeing what happened with the raid at Hyundai?

The first thing I did [after that story broke] was send an email to my head of HR and ask, ‘What’s our exposure here, if any?’ She assured me there is none, that everything is checked before people even can enter the plant.

But the other topic around labor is the H-1B visa. We are currently going through what [Trump’s announcement] means, and whether it changes our hiring strategy. It’s not that easy because, quite frankly, there’s a reason why so many people with H-1B visas are being employed here. You don’t have enough [qualified workers] that have an American passport. We will probably have to make adjustments.

Has Elon Musk’s political turn been good for your business or do you worry it’s turned consumers off from EVs in general?

Tesla owners have always been a good portion of the people that bought a Lucid, simply because they’re already used to EVs and they want variety. But we have a higher percentage now knocking at our doors.

Do you ask them explicitly why?

Some of them volunteer it. Some have stickers on the back of their Tesla.

What are you seeing in consumer demand?

Demand is strong right now. That’s to be expected until the end of this month [Sept. 30, when federal subsidies expire]. For the Gravity, we decided to honor the $7,500 subsidy for all of our orders that we have through the end of the year. We didn’t want to frustrate those customers, as we’re still ramping up [production], so we took that hit. We were able to do that because the actual average selling price of the Gravity, as it’s currently configured by our customers, is significantly higher than we thought — about $120,000 on a starting price of $94,900.

So people are putting up $25,000 for features.

The technology package, dynamic driving, rear-wheel steering, and so on. It’s really surprising. We thought that the people would be more selective.

There’s a sense that those Chinese EV makers are taking over in the markets that allow them to be imported — in Europe, where they’re now outselling Teslas, and in Latin America, where they’re now being manufactured. Is that dominance inevitable?

I wouldn’t call it dominance. Let’s not forget that European customers are proud of their own industries. And the most recent products that my fellow countrymen came up with are better than the ones that they had before.

But we don’t want to be competing with low-cost Chinese vehicles. I don’t think that’s a place you want to be in the future. That’s another thing — we have no plans to go to China.

Sell there, manufacture there, or both?

Anything. When I started to work with Lucid in 2018, the long-term plan certainly [was to have] a big plant in China. Because at that time, everyone thought the savior is in China because it’s such a big market. At that time, I already said it’s not a good idea, because I expected exactly what is now happening — the local players coming of age, and local customers coming to value local products. They’ve gotten really good, no doubt about it. For me, it was clear that they would squeeze out the international players at some point, that [Chinese companies would say,] ‘Once we have all of your knowledge, then you can get out.’ And that’s exactly what happened. And at that time, the decision was made to not build a plant in China, but in Saudi Arabia, and people looked at us like we had two heads.

There’s been this evolution in the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which controls Lucid, from being seen as throwing money around the world to buy influence, to now wanting domestic economic returns. The idea can’t be forever for you to ship cars made in Arizona over in kits and reassemble them there?

No, absolutely not. The plant that we’re building right now is a full-production plant. We’re helping to build a local ecosystem to build jobs in a new industry that has never existed in the country before.

You have to distinguish two things. The PIF is one thing. They invested in us through the international arm, not the local arm. They see us as an American company that now happens to be also local in KSA. But it’s all about establishing an automotive cluster, being part of the Vision 2030, and localizing components over time, and creating jobs.

Should PIF just take Lucid private, with the stock where it is today?

I don’t know of any ambitions right now to take it private. One thing to keep in mind: We are an American company and a global company. If PIF were to take it private, it would immediately become a Saudi automotive manufacturer — which, outside of the [Gulf] region, would not be the greatest selling point for being a global company. So you actually need to, in my opinion, [keep it] the way it is right now to be seen as a global and an American company. Again, I’m not in those discussions, but I think that that would not be the right strategy for Lucid.

You’re a big buyer of advanced chips, and the Saudis have a huge interest in that ecosystem. Have you had any trouble getting them?

We have a very good relationship with Nvidia, so that hasn’t been a problem. We also have Qualcomm chips. And the question of any kind of [chips] localization in Saudi Arabia … hasn’t knocked on our doors yet. We talk about a lot of localization as part of the plant that we’re building, to have suppliers around us, but when it comes to chips, that hasn’t come up. What has come up, though, is local production of battery cells.

And where is the kingdom in that?

Pursuing it.