Saudi Arabia expects to sell 150,000 electric vehicles by 2026

Saudi Arabia will produce and export more than 150,000 electric automobiles by the year 2026, according to the country’s minister of communications and information technology, Eng. Abdullah Al-Swaha.
The US electric vehicle giant Lucid Motors Company aims to produce 150,000 electric cars annually in Saudi Arabia by 2027, he pointed out.
CEO and Chief Technology Officer of Lucid Peter Rawlinson said earlier that the EV giant intends to start building a factory very soon in Saudi Arabia. “We plan to start manufacturing cars in 2025 and we will increase production in 2026 and 2027 to reach 150,000 cars annually,” he said.
Lucid Motors started construction work of its first overseas electric vehicle factory in Saudi Arabia, Minister of Investment Khalid Al-Falih said in May this year. The plant will be one of three assembly centers for the California-headquartered electric vehicle maker, 61 percent of which is owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF). Lucid announced in March a $30 million lease agreement with developer Emaar Economic City for a plot of industrial land in the King Abdullah Economic City in Rabigh.
In April, the Saudi government revealed that it had placed an order with Lucid for 50,000 to 100,000 electric vehicles to be delivered over the following ten years. Investment in the business is a part of a larger initiative to diversify the economy of the nation away from its reliance on oil as part of its Vision 2030 objectives. One ambitious goal of the plan is to have at least 30% of the cars in Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh run on electricity by the end of the decade.