Lucid Motors is at risk of losing the trademark for its Gravity SUV name, just months before the company is supposed to go into production.
Google Ventures-backed EV charging company Gravity Inc. filed a “petition to cancel” with the US Patent and Trademark Office’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) in December, seeking revocation of Lucid’s Gravity trademark. The startup claims in the filing that Lucid’s use of the Gravity name could confuse consumers, as Gravity Inc. uses it for EV charging and has previously used it to operate a fleet of EV taxis.
The challenge comes at a time when Lucid is struggling to attract customers, putting increased pressure on the Gravity SUV to succeed when it rolls off the line late this year. The company lost $2.8 billion in 2023 and forecasts only about 9,000 cars in 2024, after once predicting it would make 10 times that.
Lucid disputed the report, but recently warned investors about it annual deposit with the Capital Market Commission that “[s]Such disputes and challenges may be expensive and may adversely affect our ability to maintain the goodwill we have acquired with respect to a particular brand.” A Lucid representative declined to comment beyond what is on file with the TTAB.
“We feel very, very confident about it,” Moshe Cohen, CEO of Gravity Inc., said of the report in an interview with TechCrunch.
Gravity Inc. has spent the past few years working on designing and building advanced fast-charging stations for electric vehicles, and unveiled its first flagship in New York last week. It also began operating a fleet of electric taxis in the city in late 2021 as part of the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) pilot program, using a Mustang Mach-E SUV and Tesla Model Y.
The startup was trademarked for its use of the word Gravity in 2017, in connection with “transportation services, namely, transportation by rental cars. passenger transportation; taxi and limousine transportation’ and ‘computer software and downloadable software in the nature of a mobile application for coordinating transportation services, namely, software for the automated scheduling and dispatch of motor vehicles’.
However, the TLC pilot program ended in 2023. A TLC spokesperson told TechCrunch that one of Gravity’s taxis is still active on its system.
Lucid, on it answer in the petition filed last week, it says Gravity does not currently operate an EV fleet and argues that consumers will not be confused by the two different uses of the Gravity name.
“[T]the offer for sale of electric cars is completely different from [Gravity Inc.’s] purported provision of transportation by rental car, passenger transport and taxi and limousine
transport services and related transport offers, to such an extent that consumers are not likely to believe this [Gravity Inc.’s] and [Lucid’s] goods and/or services are linked,” Lucid says in its response. “Additionally, based on information and belief, [Gravity Inc.] discontinued the use of the GRAVITY mark for transportation and transportation-related services prior to the filing of this application.”
To that end, Lucid also filed a countersuit to try to force Gravity Inc. to relinquish its trademark because it abandoned the fleet business. “[Lucid] believes he is and will continue to be harmed by [Gravity Inc.’s] registration,” the company writes.
