The Lucid Air Grand Touring is a startup’s take on a great luxury EV

182

It's been more than a decade since Tesla proved that it's possible to start a new American automaker—and even become profitable. Its success has sparked a wave of subsequent EV startups, each with a mission to decarbonize our transportation sector. But that was a difficult prospect even before 2020 brought its own flavor of disruption to this nascent industry.

Of those upstarts, Rivian and Lucid have made it into production thanks to large investments. Rivian is busy building EV pickups and SUVs aimed at those with an affluent outdoorsy lifestyle, plus 100,000 electric delivery vans for Amazon. Lucid is further behind, but it too has gone into production with the Lucid Air, a handsome luxury sedan with a tiny drag coefficient, oodles of power and torque, and a rather hefty price tag—the Air Grand Touring we tested starts at $138,000.

Ars first met the Lucid Air in 2017 when the company brought one of its alpha prototypes to Washington, DC, to show off to lawmakers. In 2021, we went for a ride in the passenger seat, but now we've had some actual seat time in this intriguing EV.

Aimed at Stuttgart, not Austin

In the past, Lucid CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson was adamant that his target with the Air was not the Tesla Model S—a car for which Rawlinson worked as chief engineer—but the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, a vehicle considered throughout the industry to be the gold standard for luxury sedans. In the process, however, Lucid has out-Tesla'd Tesla anyway, evolving and polishing many of the ideas we've seen pioneered in that car when it was new.

It's quite short for a big luxury car; at 195.9 inches (4,966 mm), it's a foot shorter than the current S-Class and even more so compared to BMW's big new i7. Perhaps coincidentally, it's exactly as long and has the same 116.5-inch (2,959 mm) wheelbase as the Model S. But at 76.2 inches (1,935 mm) wide, it's narrower than any of its competitors. I had to do a double-take when I saw that figure, as the car feels wide from the driver's seat; Lucid has succeeded in making a TARDIS-like cabin that feels bigger than the car looks on the outside.

It's also shorter than anything you might cross-shop—not quite Ford GT40 low, but at 55.4 inches (1,407), you can see how Lucid has pursued range efficiency by minimizing the car's frontal area. Of course, frontal area is just one variable; the other is the drag coefficient, which in the case of the Air was a stunning 0.21 but is now an astonishing 0.197 following some improvements Lucid made in 2022.

About 60 percent of an EV's energy is spent combating air resistance at highway speeds, so you can understand why Lucid has gone to that effort. The low-drag design is coupled to a large lithium-ion traction battery—in the case of the Air Grand Touring, 112 kWh is useable—which translates to some extraordinary range estimates. Fitted with 19-inch wheels, the Air Grand Touring is capable of 516 miles (830 km) on a single charge, says the EPA.

As is usually the case, our test car was fitted with 21-inch wheels (a $2,000 option) with Pirelli P Zero performance tires instead of more efficient 19-inch wheels. That cuts 47 miles (76 km) of range in the process, but 469 miles (755 km) on a single charge makes this EV an ideal companion for long drives.

A Lucid Air seen from the front 3/4 — Although the 21-inch wheels sap range, the car has so much of it to begin with, it's not a problem. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

Range is rarely a problem

The battery pack is engineered to run at above 900 V, allowing the Air to DC fast-charge at up to 300 kW, something independently confirmed by Tom Moloughney of Inside EVs. Lucid claims up to 200 miles (332 km) of range in 12 minutes, though that number is based on the more efficient wheel size.

Here, I have to praise the Air for providing the most painless non-Tesla EV fast charging I've encountered. Lucid has implemented plug-and-charge (ISO 15118), and the Air Grand Touring comes with two or three years of unlimited Electrify America charging sessions, depending on when the car was ordered. I expected the usual headaches, but I instead found an EV that just worked. Each time I plugged it into an Electrify America charger—both the older ABB model and the new units the network is rolling out nationwide—the car and charger shook hands, and the electrons flowed.

I didn't witness power levels as high as 300 kW, but I only used one 350 kW-capable charger during my time with the car, when it was already above 50 percent state of charge. (It's polite to give an EV back to the fleet company with as much battery as possible.) Unfortunately, when I did need to charge the car from about 15 percent SoC, my EA location was only capable of 150 kW. But over the course of a 41-minute lunch, the car's range display went from 60 to 300 miles (97 to 483 km), adding 66 kWh.

A Lucid Air, charging — In addition to stopping at EA chargers, I also found this 50 kW Shell Recharge DC charger at the Patuxent River Naval Air Museum, which fed me 34 kWh over 49 minutes. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

The one-two combo of flawless fast charging and a large battery capacity almost but not entirely obviated range anxiety. For day-to-day driving, it's of as little concern as it would be in a gasoline-powered car with enough room in its tank to fit 300 miles' worth of gas. On road trips, I would want to pull over for a stretch and a coffee perhaps twice as often as the Lucid might demand a fresh infusion of energy.

Level 2 charging will take longer, as you might expect. Using the onboard cable, the Air will charge at up to 9.6 kW, so a complete charge may take almost 12 hours. Lucid says you get up to 40 miles/64 km of range per hour. For the impatient, Lucid sells a 19.2-kW AC charger, which doubles that number to 80 miles (129 km) of range per hour.

This requires an 80 A circuit, like the similar Ford charger for the F-150 Lightning. And like that charger, the Lucid Connected Home Charging Station is also capable of bidirectional charging, so you could use the car as a battery to power your house in the event of a blackout. At $1,200, the Lucid charger is expensive, but it's a bit cheaper than Ford's Charge Station Pro.

In the end, I spent too much time in Sprint mode to get anywhere close to the Air Grand Touring's estimate of 4.1 miles/kWh. This mode gives you a combined 819 hp (611 kW) and 885 lb-ft (1,120 Nm) from the pair of permanent magnet electric motors (one driving each axle). Despite the car's 5,236-lb (2,375 kg) curb weight, launch control will hurl it to 60 mph in as little as three seconds at a drag strip—on empty but otherwise normal American blacktop, you might add a couple of tenths, but it's still a darn quick car any way you cut it.

While I only used launch control a couple of times, I didn't exactly hypermile while I was driving the Air, and although only about 30 percent of my time was spent in Sprint mode, I still averaged just 3 miles/kWh (21 kWh/100km) over about 290 miles (467 km). I don't doubt the Air Grand Touring can get much better range than that, but in practice, there's less incentive to conserve energy than in a car with a smaller battery and unreliable charging.

A fast car that’s easy to drive slowly

The other two drive modes—Smooth and Swift—cut power by about 30 percent, Lucid told me. I'd be hard-pressed to tell you the difference between those two after four days of driving, but I believe Swift has a sharper throttle map.

Either way, it's a remarkably easy car to drive slowly, thanks to a throttle that has very gentle tip-in and, even in the standard setting, quite strong regenerative braking when you lift your foot a little. In fact, I found the one-pedal driving to be extremely well-programmed in the standard regen setting. Despite having at least 500 hp even in the most turned-down mode, ambling along a city street at 20 mph (32 km/h) feels entirely natural. And it was more than enough to keep pace with DC-area highway traffic.

I was less impressed with the Air's steering, which was always rather heavy and provided minimal feedback. Despite being a quick-performance car, the Air did not encourage me to take the longer, twistier, more fun route home, unlike the Porsche Taycan or BMW i7.

From the driver's seat, the Air's cockpit is dominated by screens. In front of you is a massive display—actually, three separate panels bonded under a single sheet of glass. Like those in the Cadillac Lyriq and Porsche Taycan, this display is bright enough in daylight not to require a binnacle. The steeply canted A-pillar is thick, and the left one creates a blind spot, particularly when turning left.

Lucid Air view from the driver's seat — The driver's side A-pillar causes a blind spot, and my passenger was not a fan of the cupholders. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

The leftmost portion is a touchscreen, and it's here that you lock and unlock the car, the trunk, and the charger port and change the wiper and headlight settings. In the middle, directly in front of the driver, is the main instrument display. If you're not using the driver assist (either regular adaptive cruise control (called DreamDrive) or the more capable DreamDrive Pro, a $10,000 option that adds lidar and better-assisted driving ability), the display is an intuitive dial that shows you how much relative energy you are deploying or regenerating. It also displays turn-by-turn directions, and in DreamDrive modes, the center dial is replaced by an illustration of the roadway that shows you whether assisted driving is turned on and if a car ahead is being detected by the suite of sensors.

The right portion of the display is a touchscreen where you'll find media playback and navigation. However, when you fire up the navigation app, you can also display another map on the (retractable) touchscreen that sits on the center stack. This screen is also where you find all the car's settings, the climate controls, seat controls, and so on. But there are dedicated physical controls to increase or decrease cabin temperature, fan speed, and audio volume on a strip of the dashboard between the upper and lower displays. Lucid has also used physical stalks to aim the cabin air vents rather than requiring you to use a touchscreen to aim them, as some other recent cars have done.

Lucid's infotainment system is now quite snappy, and the UI is clear and intuitive. Still, like all entirely touch-based interfaces, it's more distracting to use than dedicated physical controls (either discrete buttons or a jog wheel like BMW and Mazda use), and the voice recognition is not good enough to rely on. And like the other EV startups, there is no Apple CarPlay or Android Auto. At least not yet— Lucid is known to be working on adding those features, and CarPlay has been seen in the wild. (It's thought that the holdup is getting the two-display mode working properly.)

Life in the back seats is not quite as swanky as it is in the front. There are acres of legroom—bizarrely, the spec sheet claims just 36.6 inches (930 mm) but I could not reach the front seat while strapped in behind it, so it's definitely a lot more than that. But unlike an S Class or BMW i7, there are no screens or infotainment displays for the rear passengers, and the reclining loungers we saw in the 2017 prototype have yet to make it into production.

Cargo is split between a 10-cubic-foot (283) frunk that's wide but not especially deep and a very deep 22.1-cubic-foot (626 L) trunk at the rear.

Much improved

I also want to recognize Lucid for making substantial improvements to the Air over time. Our four-day loan of one of Lucid's press cars marked my second drive in one of the cars; in December, a very kind Ars reader lent me his car for a few hours. It's fair to say I did not gel with that car as much as I did with this more recent drive. Some of that was probably due to the added familiarity, but the build quality appears to have improved compared to the early-build cars, both in fit and finish and powertrain refinement.

The infotainment system has also improved since then, and Lucid has been pushing out a stream of over-the-air software updates so often that there were OTA updates to be applied during both times we tested an Air. The OTA update process is extremely simple—when you park the car, you accept the update, lock the car, and walk away; 45 minutes later, the update has run and the car is ready to go again.

An intriguing car

By the time I gave the Air back to Lucid, I was quite enamored with it. While I didn't match the claimed efficiency, I didn't really try, and I still had more than enough energy to go wherever I wanted. The seamless fast charging also impressed me.

Lucid Air front badge at night — Lucid at night. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

But there's strong competition for customers willing to spend ~$150,000 on an EV sedan. It's definitely a more handsome car than the BMW i7, but it can't quite match the BMW for interior style or the breadth of capabilities of its infotainment software. Tesla's Model S is cheaper and faster in Plaid form, but it feels dated next to the Lucid. The Mercedes-Benz EQS comes from the same group that makes the mighty S-Class, but it spoils the party with its weird brake pedal behavior. And, of course, there's the Porsche Taycan and Audi RS e-tron GT for those looking for something a little sportier. How fortunate, then, for those who can afford to be that spoiled for choice.

Listing image: Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan M. Gitlin Automotive Editor

Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica's automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC.

182

View Comments