Electric vehicle startup Fisker said Monday that it spent less money in 2022 than it had expected, and that it remains on track to begin deliveries of its Ocean SUV this spring and to build more than 40,000 vehicles in 2023.

Fisker’s shares closed up over 30% on Monday.

Fisker said that to date, 56 Oceans have been built at manufacturing partner Magna International’s contract-manufacturing facility in Austria. Fifteen of those were completed before year-end and are being used for testing by both Fisker and Magna, as the two companies refine the manufacturing process, test additional features, and work through regulatory approval processes in the U.S., Canada and Europe.

The report comes less than a week after EV startups Lucid and Nikola underwhelmed with their production and delivery results.

Fisker said previously that the Ocean would have about 350 miles of range in top trims, but CEO Henrik Fisker said Monday that early testing has shown the Ocean has more range than expected.

“These results reinforce our expectation that, at the time of launch, the Fisker Ocean will have the longest range of any SUV/Crossover priced below $70,000,” he said.

In base trim, the Ocean has about 250 miles of range and a starting price of $37,499; longer-range versions start at about $50,000.

Fisker expects to complete the testing needed for regulatory approval of the Ocean next month, and to ramp up production — and begin deliveries — in the second quarter. The company reiterated its previous production guidance — “up to” 42,400 vehicles in 2023 — “provided the supply chain delivers per our forecast and we receive [regulatory approval] in a timely manner.”

Fisker had “approximately 65,000” reservations for the Ocean as of Feb. 24, up slightly from “over 62,000” as of its third-quarter earnings report in early November. Because it will be built in Austria, the Ocean won’t qualify for the new U.S. government EV incentives.

Fisker spent a total of $702 million in 2022, a bit below its guidance range of $715 million to $790 million. The company had $736.5 million in cash remaining at year-end, including $57 million raised from its ongoing at-the-market share offering in the fourth quarter of 2022. It currently expects to spend between $535 million and $610 million in 2023.

Fisker is targeting a positive gross profit margin of between 8% and 12% for the year and said that it may have positive earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization, or EBITDA, for the full year as well.

Fisker’s fourth-quarter net loss was $170.1 million, or 54 cents per share, on revenue of about $306,000. Both were short of estimates: Wall Street analysts polled by Refinitiv had expected a loss of 42 cents per share on revenue of $2.5 million.

Fisker also said it has made progress on its upcoming second model, a lower-cost small EV called the Pear, and it remains on track to go into production next year.

The company said it now has “over 5,600” reservations for the Pear, up from “over 5,000” reservations in early November. The Pear, which is expected to start at $29,900, will be built by Foxconn Technology Group in the former Lordstown Motors factory in Ohio starting in 2024.

Luxury electric vehicle maker Lucid appears to have a demand problem.

The company said during its fourth-quarter earnings report Wednesday that it had “over 28,000” reservations for its Air sedan as of Feb. 21. That was a surprise, given that the company had claimed “over 34,000” reservations in November and delivered fewer than 2,000 vehicles in the fourth quarter.

Even more surprising: Lucid said it plans to build just 10,000 to 14,000 vehicles in 2023, far fewer than the roughly 27,000 Wall Street analysts had expected — and than the roughly 34,000 vehicles per year that Lucid’s factory is set up to build.

Shares of the company have fallen about 15% since the Wednesday report.

Lucid faced a rough road getting the Air into production. The company spent much of the first half of 2022 scrambling to secure key components and untangling logistics snags. Now, with production running more or less smoothly, it seems to be facing a new problem: Not enough of its reservations are converting to orders.

CEO Peter Rawlinson acknowledged as much during the earnings call when he reminded listeners that reservations aren’t binding.

“We’ve solved production. That is not the gating issue here now,” Rawlinson said. “My focus is on sales. And here’s the thing: We’ve got what I believe to be the very best product in the world. … Too few people are aware of not just the car, but even the company.”

Rawlinson went on to say he believes that to be an “entirely solvable problem” and plans to focus on “amplifying customer awareness” in 2023.

More marketing might help. But clearly, demand for Lucid’s vehicles isn’t materializing as quickly as the company expected, which raises some tough questions for investors.

First, how big is Lucid’s potential market? Any estimate of how much Lucid could grow has to start with an estimate of the “total addressable market,” and it appears the company’s estimates on that front may have been too rosy, given that its factory is set up to produce many more vehicles than it’s building now.

Running an auto factory well below capacity isn’t exactly a route to profitability, as Chief Financial Officer Sherry House conceded during Lucid’s earnings call.

“As we produce vehicles at low volumes on production lines designed for higher volumes, we have and we will continue to experience negative gross profit related to labor and overhead costs,” House said.

That leads to a second, related question: How long will Lucid have to run its factory at a loss? Or, put another way, how long will it take Lucid to get to profitability — and how much money will it have to raise between now and then?

Bank of America analyst John Murphy has long been bullish on Lucid, but in a note to investors following Lucid’s earnings report, he cut the bank’s rating on the stock to hold, from buy. Murphy wrote that he now thinks Lucid won’t break even before 2027, and that the company will need to raise more capital sooner than he had previously expected.

The good news is that Lucid has a deep-pocketed investor. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund owns about 62% of Lucid, and has shown — most recently in December, when it invested an additional $915 million — that it’s still willing to fund the company. As long as it has the Saudi fund’s backing, Lucid should be able to keep going.

But the road to profitability — and to a big payday for Lucid’s investors — is now looking longer.