News

Monday dawned bright for electric car stocks, with Lucid Group (NASDAQ: LCID) leading the pack higher on the back of some positive news for EV production and deliveries. Rivian Automotive (NASDAQ: RIVN) and Polestar Automotive (NASDAQ: PSNY) followed right along -- despite Polestar getting some bad news to start off the day.

As of 12:05 p.m. ET, both Lucid and Rivian are up 3.9%, while Polestar is against all odds edging them both out with a 4.3% gain.

Lucid's good news

Starting with the best news of the day, Lucid announced this morning that it produced 2,110 cars in Q2 2024 -- and delivered 2,394. This means Lucid produced fewer cars this year than last (Q2 2023 production was 2,173 vehicles), but delivered a lot more EVs than a year ago. Q2 2023 deliveries were only 1,404.

This seems pretty impressive -- 70% year-over-year sales growth.

How did Lucid deliver more cars than it produced? Simply put, Lucid worked down some of its inventory -- which also sounds like good news, both for Lucid itself, which dug itself out of a bit of a hole, and potentially also for Rivian and Polestar, if it means demand for EVs in general is perking back up.

Polestar's bad news

But does Lucid's good news bode well for its electric vehicle-manufacturing peers? Actually, it might. Last week, Polestar announced rapid growth in its own EV deliveries between Q1 and Q2, with sequential growth of 80% to "approximately 13,000" electric cars delivered. Management said the U.S., Swedish, Norwegian, and German markets in particular all showed "strong momentum," with a "positive impact on inventory levels and cash flow."

Problem is, even with strong sales growth, investment bank Citigroup warned today that Polestar's free cash flow will remain negative, and that U.S. tariffs and falling EV prices aren't helping matters much. Citi cut its price target on Polestar to $1.10 per share.

Seeing as Lucid and Rivian are also continuing to burn cash, I'd hesitate to chase any of these EV stocks higher until they're more clearly on a path to profits.

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Citigroup is an advertising partner of The Ascent, a Motley Fool company. 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.

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