Construction has begun on the Lucid Motors electric vehicle factory in Saudi Arabia, the Kingdom’s Minister of Investment said on Wednesday.
Workers have broke ground on the site, Khalid al-Falih said during a panel at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos.
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 Investmend 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, near Jeddah.
The Saudi Arabian government in April announced that it had placed an order for between 50,000 and 100,000 electric vehicles from Lucid within the next ten years.
Investment in the company is part of a wider drive to diversify the country’s economy away from oil in its Vision 2030.
One ambitious aim of the plan is to have at least 30 percent of the vehicles in the capital Riyadh operate on electric power by the turn of the decade.
