Lucid Jumps 7%, Rivian Edges Higher: Is the EV Selloff Finally Exhausted?
Lucid is surging hard off multi-year lows while Rivian barely twitches on the same tape, and the gap between those two moves tells you exactly what is really driving this afternoon's action in electric vehicle stocks.
Electric vehicle names are catching a small bid at midday Thursday, but the move is confined to the most beaten-down corners of the group, with the Global X Autonomous & Electric Vehicles ETF (NASDAQ:DRIV) up 1% to $34.77. Meanwhile, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) is up 0.75% to $771.85. The autonomous and electric vehicles fund’s modest gain is the key tell: the sector isn’t broadly rallying, so any individual EV name moving hard today is moving on its own.
Lucid Group (NASDAQ:LCID | LCID Price Prediction) stock is up 7% to $5.30, extending a small bounce off multi-year lows. That gain follows a year-to-date decline of 53% through Wednesday’s close. Traders should also observe that Rivian Automotive (NASDAQ:RIVN) stock is up 2% to $16.72, and it entered Thursday down 17% year to date through Wednesday’s close.
That gap between the two bounces frames the question in the headline. Lucid stock was down 16% over the past week and down 24% over the past month through Wednesday’s close. Rivian stock was up 4% over the past week through the same session, a very different tone heading into Thursday.
Price Mechanics Help Explain the Move
No verified company announcement, product news, contract, regulatory action, analyst rating change or financing event has hit Lucid today. The most recent official Lucid release listed by the company’s newswire feed is dated August 20, when Lucid announced its first retail partner in the Netherlands. That release is more than a week old, so it isn’t a same-day driver, and neither is the operational reset the new leadership team laid out earlier in the month.
What’s left is mechanics: Lucid shares trade in single digits with a beta of 0.86, in a name that has fallen 77% over the past year and 98% over five years through Wednesday’s close. Heavy short-term declines in low-priced stocks routinely produce sharp counter-trend bounces, especially on a broadly risk-on tape led by the S&P 500 benchmark. That’s the plain description of today’s action, and it’s happening without any change in the underlying fundamentals.
Bounce Size Tracks Prior Decline
Rivian is up far less on the same tape despite sitting in the same cluster, and the reason is the setup. Rivian stock was up 24% over the past year through Wednesday’s close, while Lucid stock was down 77% over the same span. The size of the pain is dictating the size of today’s rebound, and that’s the clearest evidence available that today’s action is positioning rather than news.
Broader peers aren’t confirming a sector rebound. Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), Nio (NYSE:NIO) and XPeng (NYSE:XPEV) round out the cluster investors are watching, and the muted 1% move in the electric vehicle fund shows the group isn’t ripping higher together. Positioning is doing the work here.
What to Watch
Prudent traders should know that one session of gains after a decline of this size doesn’t mean EV-sector shareholders are out of the woods. A 5% pop in a stock that entered Thursday down more than half its 2026 value is just a bounce, and the evidence for exhaustion isn’t there yet. Lucid stock’s 50-day moving average sits at $6.25 and its 200-day at $8.86, so the trend structure above current prices remains firmly negative.
Investors weighing their exposure to Lucid can size their positions for continued volatility and persistent negative free cash flow rather than for an imminent reversal (we wrote a full playbook on treating names like this as a small, rule-bound slice of a portfolio, here). Traders may want to keep an eye on whether today’s gains hold through the session and whether volume expands on any push toward that 50-day line. A clean rejection there would be consistent with the prevailing downtrend.
The next hard company catalysts for the pair sit outside today’s session. Rivian is on the cusp of external customer deliveries of its R2 vehicle, and Lucid is early in executing against its $1.4 billion cash flow improvement plan under new leadership. Until one of those turns into a delivered result, moves like today’s look more like positioning around a beaten-down group than resolution of the selloff.
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David Moadel is financial writer specializing in stocks, ETFs, options, precious metals, and Bitcoin. David has written well over 1,000 articles for leading online publications, helping investors understand markets, income strategies, and risk.
His work has appeared in The Motley Fool, InvestorPlace, U.S. News & World Report, TipRanks, ValueWalk, Benzinga, Market Realist, TalkMarkets, Finmasters, 24/7 Wall St., and others.
With a master’s degree in education, David has taught at the elementary, high school, and college levels. That teaching background shapes his writing style: clear, educational, and practical. David has also built a loyal social-media audience by providing trustworthy financial content on YouTube, X/Twitter, and StockTwits.
