Zach Walker, Lucid’s Senior Director of Product Management and Advanced Product Creation, has left the company to join General Motors. The departure lands at an awkward moment: Lucid is weeks away from unveiling the Cosmos, its first midsize crossover, and preparing to begin production at its AMP-2 facility in King Abdullah Economic City, Saudi Arabia. Walker’s farewell on LinkedIn referenced both Cosmos and Earth – the second midsize model in the pipeline. YourNewsClub treats the timing as more significant than the departure itself. Losing the person most responsible for product definition on a vehicle you have not yet shipped is a different category of risk than losing an executive after launch.
This is Lucid’s second senior exit of 2026. Claudia Gast, the Senior Vice President of Strategy and Business Development, left in February after joining the company in December 2022. Software team members were let go late last year following problems with the Gravity model. The exits accumulate against a backdrop of leadership turbulence that began when founder-CEO Peter Rawlinson stepped down in February 2025. Silvio Napoli, formerly CEO of Schindler Group, took the permanent CEO role on June 1, 2026, ending a 14-month search. Napoli’s stated priorities: “strengthening customer engagement, operating with consistency and accountability, achieving cost competitiveness and streamlining our organisation.” That is a restructuring mandate, not a growth mandate. YourNewsClub reads it as a deliberate signal that Napoli intends to stabilise before expanding.
The Cosmos context matters here. Interim CEO Marc Winterhoff told Deutsche Bank analyst Edison Yu in March that the midsize platform is “very much up there on par with how the Air and the Gravity perform,” and called it “the big game changer.” Start of production at the Saudi plant is targeted for the end of 2026. The Gravity, Lucid’s luxury SUV, was already subject to a recall-triggered stop-sale that halted deliveries for nearly one third of Q1. Lucid was nonetheless the only pure EV maker to grow California registrations in Q1 2026, posting a 37.1% year-over-year increase. That data point is real. So is the exit of the person who defined the Cosmos product. YourNewsClub places the combination of Walker’s departure and the Cosmos launch proximity at the top of the near-term Lucid watch list.
Napoli’s executive equity structure was formally approved at the June 4 annual meeting, which also authorised an amendment to the 2021 Stock Incentive Plan adding 23.5 million shares and raising the total authorised pool to 61.4 million. The Saudi Public Investment Fund, Lucid’s majority owner, backed an increase in a loan agreement to nearly $2 billion, providing liquidity runway through 2027. Financial stability is not the immediate concern. Product execution is. YourNewsClub expects the most consequential signal of whether Napoli’s restructuring is working to arrive alongside the Cosmos unveil – whenever Lucid announces that date. If the unveil lands on schedule and with a firm production start date, the Walker departure becomes a footnote. If the unveil slips, it becomes a chapter.
Stack this against what Lucid actually needs from 2026: a midsize platform that reaches a $50,000 price point, begins production in Saudi Arabia, and demonstrates that the company can execute a launch without the recall and software issues that plagued the Gravity. Three things to watch: the Cosmos unveil date, any further senior product or software exits, and whether Q2 2026 California EV registration data shows Lucid holding its year-over-year growth against Tesla and Rivian. All three arrive before year-end.
The broader pattern at Lucid is worth naming before it becomes invisible through repetition. The company has seen departures across product management, strategy, software, and marketing in the span of twelve months. Each exit, taken individually, has a reasonable explanation. Collectively, they suggest that the leadership instability at the top created downstream uncertainty that the people closest to product felt first. Napoli’s restructuring mandate includes, by implication, a people-stabilisation task that is harder to execute than the financial one. Your News Club will monitor whether any further product or software exits occur before the Cosmos unveil, treating each additional departure in those functions as an execution risk multiplier for the launch.