While General Motors was preparing for President Biden鈥檚 visit to its retooled Factory ZERO in Detroit, another American car maker made headlines on Tuesday. Electric vehicle start-up Lucid blew past Ford鈥檚 market capitalization on Tuesday to become the world鈥檚 eighth most valuable car manufacturer, despite having delivered its first cars to customers as recently as October 30.
In its first earnings report as a public company, Lucid, a Newark, California-based EV maker had reported a surge in reservations to 17,000 vehicles, while also announcing that its first production car, the Lucid Air had been named the 2022 MotorTrend Car of the Year, beating big-name competition including the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, Mercedes-Benz EQS and Porsche Taycan to win the coveted award.
Following in the footsteps of Tesla and Rivian, Lucid is the third pure electric vehicle maker among the world鈥檚 most valuable car companies, and it鈥檚 only a matter of time before it also surpasses GM to leave all of the (former) 鈥淏ig Three鈥 behind it. The fact that neither Lucid nor Rivian have delivered a relevant number of cars to customers so far doesn鈥檛 stop investors from rating them highly. The chance to catch an early ride with what could become the next Tesla seems too attractive to pass on for many, even though there鈥檚 a large element of uncertainty and risk involved.
As the following chart shows, Tesla, Rivian and Lucid are valued at a completely different scale to traditional automakers. Toyota, Volkswagen and Daimler, the three most valuable industry veterans, have a combined market capitalization of $505 billion. Tesla alone is worth more than twice that, combined with Rivian and Lucid, the top 3 EV companies are worth $1.3 trillion. Taking annual deliveries into account makes the difference in valuation even more striking. Last year, Toyota, Volkswagen and Daimler delivered 21.8 million cars to Tesla鈥檚 500,000. That results in a combined valuation per delivered vehicle of $23,208 for the three traditional car makers vs. a whopping $2.6 million for the three EV upstarts.
