RIYADH — Minister of Communications and Information Technology Eng. Abdullah Al-Swaha said on Wednesday that Saudi Arabia will manufacture and export more than 150,000 electric cars in 2026. The US electric vehicle giant Lucid Motors Company aims to produce 150,000 electric cars annually in Saudi Arabia by 2027, he pointed out. CEO and Chief Technology Officer of Lucid Peter Rawlinson said earlier that the EV giant intends to start building a factory very soon in Saudi Arabia. “We plan to start manufacturing cars in 2025 and we will increase production in 2026 and 2027 to reach 150,000 cars annually,” he said. Lucid Motors started construction work of its first overseas electric vehicle factory in Saudi Arabia, Minister of Investment Khalid Al-Falih said in May this year. 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 Investment 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 in Rabigh. The Saudi government announced in April 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 as part of its Vision 2030 plans. 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.