Saudi Arabia's first car brand has shown its first cars. On the night of Monday 21 September, Ceer, the electric-vehicle company set up by the Public Investment Fund (PIF) with Foxconn, unveiled the Exobot sedan and the Exobot SUV, two luxury electric models with gull-wing doors. Sales in the kingdom are scheduled to begin in early 2027, with first customer deliveries expected in March, and the cars are due to reach other Gulf markets in 2028.
The launch is the most tangible step yet in the kingdom's long effort to build a car industry of its own. "Our mission is to ignite that industry," Ceer's chief executive, Jim DeLuca, told Semafor.
Two cars, one design
The sedan and the SUV share a single, striking design idea. Their doors are gull-wing doors, hinged at the roof so that they lift upwards rather than swinging out, and their windscreens do not stop where a windscreen usually ends: they sweep up and into the roof. According to Semafor, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally picked the design.
Ceer has not yet published a full technical sheet, but the headline figures are bold. Semafor reports that the most powerful versions produce 1,111 hp, cover up to 670 km on a charge and accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h in 2.1 seconds. Those are numbers usually associated with hypercars rather than with four-door cars or SUVs, and they make clear where Ceer intends to begin.
Prices have not been announced. Ceer's executives say the first models are aimed at high-end buyers, and Semafor's analysis expects pricing close to that of Lucid's luxury electric cars. Five more models, at lower price points, are planned by 2030, which would give the company a range of seven. DeLuca said the plan to launch those seven products was drawn up and funded in 2023. Asked about money, DeLuca was brief. "We are fully funded," he told Semafor, while declining to say how much has been invested so far.
Built on the Red Sea coast
The Exobots will be made at a new plant on Saudi Arabia's west coast, north of Jeddah, with capacity for 240,000 vehicles. Tbreak places Ceer's manufacturing complex in King Abdullah Economic City, the planned city on the Red Sea where Lucid's plant began assembling cars in 2023.
The timetable has moved. The Exobot was originally due on sale in November 2026; the first sales are now scheduled for early 2027. According to Tbreak, DeLuca has described the past few years as a shift from design and engineering towards manufacturing, and the launch shows that shift under way.
Ceer itself is young. The PIF, Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund and a main engine of the Vision 2030 diversification programme, set it up in 2022 as a joint venture with Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer, and announced it that November as the first Saudi car brand. Ceer draws on technology and components from international partners including BMW, Hyundai Transys and Rimac, and says its workforce has grown from 20 people to 2,300.
A cluster takes shape
Ceer is the most visible part of a wider industrial plan. The PIF invested in Lucid in 2018 and helped bring the American electric-car maker's plant to the kingdom, the first car factory in Saudi Arabia. Hyundai is part of the emerging automotive cluster too, along with suppliers including Pirelli, Lear, Shin Young, Benteler and Fangxin, and Semafor reports that Stellantis is studying a facility of its own.
The aim is to make more of each car at home. Local content, the share of a car's parts and value that comes from inside the kingdom, is to rise in Ceer's cars from about 18 per cent to 45 per cent by 2034, and Ceer has signed 16 commercial agreements with local suppliers worth more than SAR 3.7 billion, according to figures reported by AGBI. The company also projects that by 2034 it will add US$8 billion to Saudi GDP and create about 30,000 direct and indirect jobs. Those are targets, not results, and the coming years will show how many of them are met.
What it means for Gulf buyers
For drivers in the region, the Exobot is something genuinely new: a premium car from a Gulf company, built in the Gulf and sold first to Gulf customers. Saudi buyers are first in line from early 2027. Customers in the rest of the Gulf are due to follow in 2028.
Important questions remain, starting with price. Buyers will also want to know how the cars drive, and how they cope with a Gulf summer, before the first deliveries in March.
For now, the significance lies in the fact itself. Saudi Arabia now has a car brand with cars of its own, a plant to build them and a date to put them on the road.