Lucid stock rose early Thursday. There were a couple of reasons. One matters more than the other.

Shares of the Saudi-controlled EV startup were up 11.4% in early trading at $4.50, while the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average were up 0.8% and 0.3%, respectively.

The move came after Lucid announced a partnership with Bolt to develop autonomous driving solutions in Europe. Self-driving cars are all the rage, underpinning Tesla's trillion-dollar valuation. Bolt, for its part, aims to deploy 100,000 autonomous vehicles by 2035.

It's a solid deal for Lucid. The bigger reason for the stock pop, however, might be a comment from CEO Silvio Napoli. He told Bloomberg that the company's work with restructuring consultant AlixPartners has concluded. Lucid didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about the work done.

Lucid's work with AlixPartners has contributed to significant volatility in the stock in recent months. In July, EV news portal electric-vehicles.com suggested Lucid was considering filing for bankruptcy or going private. The company denied those reports. Still, shares traded as low as $2.37 in the aftermath, only to trade north of $8 in the following weeks. Those gains didn't last, however, with shares sliding back to about $4 before Thursday's news.

Thursday's pop still leaves Lucid stock down 57% year to date and down 78% over the past 12 months. Selling EVs isn't easy these days, especially after the September 2025 expiration of the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.

Lucid is expected to sell about 18,000 cars in 2026, up from about 16,000 in 2025. The relatively new Gravity SUV is boosting sales. That's a positive; still, a year ago, Wall Street projected 2026 sales of about 32,000 cars. In 2022, shortly after Lucid went public by merging with a SPAC, analysts projected 2026 sales volume of roughly 140,000 cars. The U.S. EV market simply didn't develop as expected.