The former chief engineer of Lucid Motors, Eric Bach, has sued the company for wrongful termination, discrimination, and retaliation, and claims one of the automaker’s top HR executives referred to him as a “German Nazi.”

The federal lawsuit, filed Monday in the Northern District of California, claims Bach was stripped of his responsibilities overseeing the powertrain division in early 2025 as a result of an HR investigation into the company’s workplace culture. Bach claims to have been targeted because of his German heritage.

Bach first learned about the disparaging comment in mid-2025 — months after the investigation into workplace culture was launched and after losing some responsibilities at the company, according to the complaint. He encouraged a co-worker to report the incident.

TechCrunch has reached out to Lucid and will update the article if the company comments on the lawsuit.

Bach claims Lucid Motors “confirmed” the HR executive made the remark. Bach logged an internal complaint against another Lucid vice president for similarly racist behavior.

He claims Lucid Motors retaliated by trying to force him to resign in October 2025. Lucid fired Bach on November 5, 2025, according to the lawsuit. Lucid Motors’ press release from that day only said he had “departed.”

The lawsuit comes during a tricky moment for Lucid Motors. The company is burning through cash as it works to ramp up production of its second vehicle, the Gravity SUV. It is developing more affordable mass-market vehicles on a mid-sized platform slated to debut sometime in late 2026.

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Lucid has also been churning through executives. The company’s VP of engineering left on the same day Bach claims to have been fired, as TechCrunch previously reported. Former CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson suddenly resigned in February, and the company has still not named a permanent replacement. Lucid’s head of investor relations, Senior Vice President of Operations, Managing Director for Europe, and the Vice Presidents of Software Quality and Marketing all left within the last year, too.

Bach, in the complaint, claims to have been ascendant before the internal investigation. An engineer who spent a decade with the company, Bach says he oversaw “all hardware engineering,” “product management and corporate planning.”

Bach states that Lucid’s chairman Turqi Alnowaiser “praised Bach’s loyalty and dedication to the Company and expressed a desire to continue working with Bach.” He also claims board member Andrew Liveris “signaled that Bach would become Chief Technology Officer (the position “is yours to lose”) and that Bach could one day become Chief Executive Officer,” according to the complaint.

The workplace culture investigation launched in late 2024, which Bach claims was “tainted by HR’s racist beliefs,” “initially resulted in Bach losing significant responsibilities.” The HR department told Bach at the time that he contributed to a poor culture at the company, according to the complaint. In addition to losing oversight of the powertrain team, Bach claims to have been excluded from board meetings.

Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.

You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing sean.okane@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal.