Reports of higher-than-expected inflation this morning, combined with an apparent flood of investor dollars chasing various cryptocurrencies — and running away from stocks — has the stock market in a funk on Thursday. Among the stocks getting hurt most are three players in the electric car industry. Carmakers Lucid Group (LCID -4.40%) and Fisker (FSR -6.31%) are down 6.3% and 5.9%, respectively, through 12:05 p.m. ET, while battery maker QuantumScape (QS -2.41%) is getting off relatively easy with only a 2.5% drop.
But inflation and popular cryptocurrencies aren’t the only problems facing electric vehicle (EV) stocks.
Lucid beat estimates (sort of)
In what I think you can call a good news, bad news announcement, Lucid announced this morning that it delivered 1,734 electric cars in the fourth quarter of 2023, beating Wall Street’s prediction of 1,696. That’s the good news.
The bad news (for Lucid, and perhaps for Fisker and QuantumScape as well) is that Lucid produced 2,391 electric cars in the quarter — or 38% more than it managed to sell. This suggests that demand for the company’s pricey EVs isn’t particularly strong. Nor was this a one-quarter problem. For 2023 as a whole, Lucid noted that it delivered 6,001 vehicles, but produced 8,428 — a 40% difference.
Thus it appears Lucid has a couple of problems dogging it. On the one hand, over the course of this year, weak demand caused the company to repeatedly lower its start-of-the-year goal of producing 14,000 EVs in 2023. On the other hand, despite cutting production, the company still ended up building more cars than it was able to sell.
That’s bad news for Lucid, obviously, and explains why its stock is going down today. But if Lucid’s troubles imply weakness in demand for electric cars in general, then this could be bad news for Fisker and QuantumScape as well — and may explain why those stocks are down as well.
Fisker tries to gin up some enthusiasm
Perhaps it’s in hopes of spurring more demand for EVs, therefore, that Fisker announced this morning that it will host “the largest owner meetup in its history on January 20, 2024 … in almost two dozen locations in the U.S.,” inviting car shoppers to drop by to test drive a new Fisker, pick up some free Fisker merchandise, and have some coffee and donuts, too.
Which I suppose isn’t a bad idea. But if you’re wondering just how popular Fisker expects this historic meetup will be, well, Fisker says it hopes “over 1,000 attendees” will show up. That doesn’t sound like a whole lot of people to me, and kind of actually kind of reinforces the view that enthusiasm is lacking among EV buyers.
Mind you, if all three of these businesses were healthy, a temporary forecast of weakening demand for EVs wouldn’t be such a big problem. But with QuantumScape burning through more than $350 million a year in negative free cash flow, Fisker burning $830 million, and Lucid burning $3.6 billion a year, these companies really need to see buyer demand that’s pedal to the metal — not stomping, nor even just tapping on the brakes.
Investors who are selling these stocks today are probably right to worry.
Rich Smith has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
