2022 Lucid Air Review | Range and Performance Test of the Lucid Air Sedan | Price, Range & More

hi aleister weaver here for edmonds with our full independent instrumented test of the lucid air dream range in other words we're going to submit it to the same rigorous process we recently applied to the tesla model s plaid and the rivian r1t we're going to perform the globally famous yes globally famous edmunds real world range test to find out whether this car really can do 520 miles on a single charge as the epa claims if it does it'll overtake the mercedes eqs to become our new range leader and be the first production car to top 500 miles and here at our test track we're going to find out whether this luxury sedan with 930 horsepower really can do zero to 60 in 2.7 seconds as lucid claims and we're going to discover whether this rival to the mercedes eqs and tesla model s is worth 170 grand of your money yes we are you've probably seen or maybe read lots of gushing press about early pre-production versions of this car but was it justified is this really a lucid dream or actually an incoherent nightmare this driver's door appears to have seized this is going to look like i'm kind of beating up on lucid and that's not the point at all oh and we're going to repeat the infamous edmund steering tears to find out whether lucid wheel is better than the tesla yoke cue the abuse doing this stuff properly costs time and money so if you like what you see please subscribe to the channel and don't forget the bell and if you're looking to sell your car head to edmunds.com sell my car for a cash offer and now without further ado let's get on with it so who or what or is or are lucid the company was actually founded back in 2007 by tesla's former vice president of engineering peter rawlinson but it's in the last decade that it's kicked on back first by saudi billions and then from a special purpose acquisition company or spak think of it as tesla reborn minus elon and the teslarati today it's worth about 40 billion dollars about the same as rivian so it's um proper now if you're honest we are a bit late to the party here reviews of this car been around for about eight months and we did have a brief drive at the launch back in september but lucid kept pushing back our official loan why because they knew we wanted to do full test numbers and an ev range test and that meant waiting for a finished car this is a production press car and it's done about 9 000 miles it was actually back at the lucid factory having a once over before it came to us this week so they say and we say it is representative of what you can buy the dream is the launch edition of the lucid and comes in two forms performance and range the former focus on performance see what they did there and has for pr reasons 1111 horsepower the range edition we have here was designed to give lucid a headline grabbing epa rating of over 500 miles it has two electric motors one at the front and one at the rear with a combined 933 horsepower for context that's 101 horsepower less than a tesla plaid but roughly double what you'll find in the edmonds top-rated gas-powered luxury sedan the mercedes s-class and the lucid has such fuel sipping nice it is has smaller 19-inch reel rims which help reduce the rolling resistance lucid actually wanted us to swap out the 19-inch rims for some 21s between the ev range test and the straight-line testing we're doing here today but we politely declined we reckon that most luxury sedan buyers won't have spare rooms sitting in their garage unless they're jay leno of course but he's probably got a chat for that lucy says it's good for 0-60 in 2.7 seconds but as you know by now we never take their word for it over to our guru of testing jonathan l fallen all right here we go we are in sprint mode disability control on because we don't have that much tire left foot on the brake i fit on accelerator oh there we go launch control whoa there we go that's quick oh okay breaking's a little a little hairier than i it was anticipating okay all right yeah that's those are the beans yeah for sure this thing is pretty sick as always it's going to take some time to crunch the numbers so in the meantime let's bring some lucidity to the lucid let's start with the looks now these things of course are always subjective but for what it's worth i think it looks great it's got a fantastic mix of kind of future eco appeal with some pretty classical handsome proportions it's a long time since i drove a car that got this much attention there's also some really cool detailing these little ports here actually feed air through the nose and then exit here along the hood and there's a similar system going on here air comes in here and comes out here just in front of the front tires now if i remember correctly ferrari was the first company to introduce this sort of technology on road cars but they were doing it more for downforce i think lucid is doing it really to improve the efficiency reduce the coefficient of drag and hence improve the range as we move down the car this car's riding on 19-inch rims and we're now getting used to seeing more and more sidewall on cars built for lots of range actually kind of like them there's plenty of sculpturing going on here and on every lucid air you get this sort of two-tone roof treatment which becomes more pronounced if you go for a darker colour follow me to the rear mr charlie if you will another thing to point out on this rear light strip when i actually turn it on or if you use the brakes that's a really clever use of leds and if i can open the trunk and if i can open the trunk there we go this is actually pretty clever lucid have managed to create a much wider trunk opening although it's still quite shallow because you've obviously got the wheels in play does mean that you can put some longer objects here maybe like golf clubs for example now excuse me a moment i've just said i kid and haven't literally haven't slept in months but if we open this rear this actually get rid of the scooter there's actually a pretty big area underneath the trunk floor too to supplement all this space and there's a very big front which is interesting because this car just feels so much better packaged than the mercedes eqs the eqs is bigger but less practical how does that work [Music] the packaging genius continues inside this car has a footprint similar to a mercedes east class but inside it's more s-class and certainly bigger than the eqs which is the s-classes electric brother if you are continuing to follow me i'm six foot four this car is set up for me and as you can see i've not only got plenty of headroom i've also got plenty of knee room too now this is the big battered version of the lucid and as a result all the underfloor of the car is packed full of chemical cells but if you go for the entry level model the so-called lucid pure which is going to cost about 80 000 when it finally arrives then that will have less batteries and as a result you get a nice little foot welder to plant your feet which means that your knees don't end up somewhere around your chin before jumping to the front i also wanted to talk about some of the easter eggs which are part of the lucid fun little throughout this car a little californian bears and that's because lucid like tesla is headquartered in california then there's this weird little tripod thing in the roof here which we've discovered is actually a microphone for the in-car telephone but our producer is utterly convinced that it's actually modeled on doc brown's flux capacitor from the back to the future delorean is that true don't know but it's kind of cool inside to my eyes at least it's a sort of blend of porsche tycoon and tesla which to be honest is no bad thing as you'd expect there's a real focus on touch screen technology but there's also some proper physical controls too i like the fact that there's proper buttons for things like the temperature the fan and the volume and get this tesla fanboys look at this real analog controls for the for the air vents so somebody owns a model three i think that's a good thing i also like the way these screens interact with one another let's say you want to call up the navigation up here which is very much in your eye line as you're driving but it's a little screen so if you want to input where you're going you can drag it down here type in where you want to go once you've agreed to go to a certain restaurant of choice you can simply swipe it up again the map continues on here and you've got access to the rest of the functionality for things like massage seats and themes which is kind of like what kind of colors you want going on charging infrastructure drive modes etc etc and watch this if you swipe up from the bottom the whole thing disappears to reveal a cunning little cubby then it slides back into place i think that's really cool but let's leave the gadgetry behind for a minute what do we think of the overall interior what's the what's the ambiance well a bit like the exterior it has a neat blend of futuristic but still practical and sensible this whole car feels like the the ceo is a is an engineer and not a eccentric billionaire i like the way the different surfaces play together the driving position is good even if i sit a little bit too high and it has a wonderful feeling of of space and sort of outdoorsiness thanks to this exaggerated glass roof even if you do get a bit too much heat soak on a hot day and the uh the tint kind of runs through my eye line which is frankly a bit irritating and that ladies and gentlemen is a neat segue into some of the foibles of this car that we really must call out let's start with the software which really falls into two camps the stuff that's a bit buggy or a bit laggy and the stuff that frankly they haven't got round to yet the stuff that buggy include things like your bluetooth phone which sometimes connects sometimes doesn't sometimes you can play spotify streaming through your phone sometimes you can't sometimes the blind spot monitoring is so slow that you've actually made the turn by the time it pops up in the dashboard then there's the stuff which you know they're obviously still developing for example you cannot yet turn off the sat nav lady now i'm sure she's charming and she chats along quite happily but after a while it gets a bit grating now i've no doubt that all of this can and probably will be fixed with over the updates as lucid matures and progresses but hey this car's already eight months old what might be harder to fix is the perception of quality and even the build quality too the material choices in here might look good but in terms of overall quality they're simply not a match for the best of the germans certainly not porsche interestingly and purely coincidentally we had a bmw ix in the office this week alongside the lucid and the bmw's aura of quality was vastly superior to this despite the fact it costs half as much let me give you a fairly obvious example of what i mean this center armrest looks nice nice bit of stitching but when you let it go now you probably wouldn't expect that on a 20 000 hatchback these days never mind a luxury sedan of this aspiration now i'm not making this up literally as we're filming the problems the build quality this door this driver's door should add appears to have seized i'm going to try locking it so we lock it so we lock it so we lock it don't do this locking it ah okay car's locked door handle's still open this is gonna look like i'm kind of beading up on lucid and that's not not the point at all okay it's just that we don't give tesla a free ride and we haven't given anybody else a free ride and this is all genuine okay so now the door handle's open click click to open car opens the other thing i should point out is that i was told to keep the key on me at all times because if you leave it in the car it might automatically lock which is something that happened to me in a mercedes a class back in 98 and that's that's not good people and now the door is locked rear door opens so let's have a look if i can now clamber across okay okay so that's now opening lock it unlock it back in the game the point of this was actually to demonstrate an issue not with the front door but actually with the rear door which has been driving me nuts all week so if you shut the door it shuts got an automatic locking which is nice then it opens again then it shuts then it opens again so you can't realistically drive away because your back door's now open so the only way to get around it give it a good old-fashioned british shove then it stays shut and always well with the world panel gaps aren't great either you can actually put your fingers inside the panel gaps in this door now in our trade we do drive pre-production prototypes and sometimes you make allowances for cars that are hand built fit and finish that sort of thing but the reality is this isn't one of those this is an actual production car we went to the lucid launch back in september as i talked to you it's now april it's done about ten thousand miles or nine and a bit and it was actually at the lucid factory before it came to us for this test [Music] [Applause] but anyway enough of that let's move on to the fun stuff the driving and to preview all of that here comes jonathan with the numbers so jonathan claims 0-60 2.7 seconds edmond says 2.8 but i think there's a caveat here isn't their claim on 21-inch wheels on a prep surface we're actually on 19-inch wheels which generally speaking would be would be slower on a normal asphalt surface that's correct and not to mention these 19s are all seasons versus the 21s which are summer tires so it's actually a really really good result really good as well actually i wasn't expecting it to probably you know perform as well as it did but you know it's it's the real deal so 2.8 seconds for a bit of context tesla model s plaid 2.3 2.3 2.3 seconds which is you know i mean that's that's a fair bit amount quicker but um you know it had much wider tires 265s in the front and 295s in the rear same driver same track yes exactly we did the quarter mile in a 10.3 seconds at 132.2 miles per hour which is moving again not quite as quick as the plaid it's about a second behind it but still i mean you know well faster than most cars that we've had out here and this of course is the range edition not the performance edition which has the stickier tires and has an extra 180 horsepower yeah give or take 111 yeah exactly memory serves braking braking 127 feet which you know it's not great but it's also not that bad for a car that's again on such small all-season tires and weighs 5200 and thirty two pounds fifty two hundred pounds yeah it's kind of like a ram 1500 truck yeah yeah i mean it's it's it's a heavy it's a heavy vehicle so after braking when the skid pad lateral g or as we know in the real world grip we averaged uh .89 g around the skid pad which again isn't great we're on all seasons uh and in fact you know this was just a hair better than the rivian but the riven is a over seven thousand pound truck truck yeah so uh i would uh you know maybe uh proceed with caution out there maybe leave the stability on for a while yeah just a little bit yeah jonathan thank you i'm gonna head out in the circuit have fun sir okay so here we go for the ride and handling section now it's a long time since i drove a car that there's this much under tired by which i mean this car's got 245 tires all round now for a bit of context uh a standard audi q5 that we also has on test has 255 that's wider tyres and they're also pumped up like a kind of 1970s arnold schwarzenegger to 49 psi now this is all about maximizing the cars range but of course you've still got 933 horsepower and what's more the tires i should have said earlier the tires are actually all season and it's a red hot day in southern california so this should be um entertaining we've run the official figures but i want to get a proper feel for for launch control so drive modes outer smooth into sprint you have to confirm that you want to go for the the full ball power and torque now left foot on the brake right foot on the power then i get a little californian bear launch murray's activators like the cameraman no three two one and boom whoa what's extraordinary is that you actually feel the whole car a all four wheels start spinning now that would be down to the tires but then you also get this kind of like little nose in the air it's almost like driving a powerboat you get this sort of like boom up in the air and away she goes i think i've ever experienced something like that before that was awesome so let's see what 933 horsepower and um she's like an interesting choice of uh of rubber feels like let's just get a little feel for it now peter rawlinson's lucids ceo is x jaguar x tesla but also x lotus and there is a hint of lotus particularly in the way that this car steers the turning's very sharp which is also true of a tesla has a nice kind of initially a nice sort of linearity to it pretty strong regen as well that's something that you can you can set up in the uh in the controls now immediately as i said liner you can feel the tires starting to push there's just ultimately not that much grip the fundamental balance of this car is actually really good and you certainly feel that out on the road as with a lot of these cars though you get that weird sort of transition between regenerative braking when you lift off the throttle then as you go for the the brakes themselves to supplement it on a track like this you never quite get the feel that you would in a traditional gas-powered car okay stability control's working overtime and boom 50-60 it's such a weird feeling that was like 100 miles an hour i'm just going to ease it through this first quick section yeah there's there's very little grip to be honest for for something with this much power you're going to get i know this is a pr stun i know it's all about maximizing the range 500 miles plus and all the rest of it but this is going to be a big challenge of evs moving forward it's this sort of debate about how much you maximize range and efficiency and how much you maximize driving dynamics and it's a difficult trade-off because ultimately is it wise to put 933 horsepower through this kind of kind of tire this kind of setup because what's the old sort of adage i think from the uh from the from the first century with power comes great responsibility 933 horsepower does not come 245 49 psi all season tires at least not normally turn it in it's not ease it out of the throttle it's kind of nice and progressive on the throttle i just like a little bit more consistency and feeling the brakes particularly through the initial part of the pedal now the ride quality i'd say the ride quality on in this trim on these tyres with these tire pressures is is good but it's not superb it's it's it's luxury car standards but say on the highway it does tend to fidget a little bit we can't wait to try this car on 21-inch tyres which which is perhaps more normal it's probably what more people are gonna buy and we suspect that that might actually improve the ride quality or you've got less sidewall you've also got less pressure and it just might be a better compromise because it's good but it's not great okay we're gonna i'm gonna try something here i'm gonna go into the into the systems and uh actually turn off the stability control it's saying significantly reduce traction control doesn't still turn it off all the way and modify abs performance should only be done by advanced drivers on closed courses well we're sitting on a closed course and i suppose i should be advanced by now disabling collision protection oh you sure want to disable it disable here we go okay so now everything is off it's still getting some traction control lights so i think what it's doing is diminishing my stability but actually still giving me a little bit of traction control just so that we don't sort of eat up these tyres okay burning it's just a lot of push it's weird that we're getting so used to 900 horsepower i mean you know in recent weeks we've driven the tesla plaid with 1000 horsepower the rivian with what 800 and something now this with 933 it's almost becoming like matter of fact she's kind of crazy when you think about it and i'm not sure it's all that responsible either we're starting to see issues with on social with people jumping teslas in echo park and everything else it's a lot of responsibility to give people and it's unlike an old kind of like gas-powered supercar which you knew you had to respect these things are just like 900 horsepower golf carts you just get in boot the throttle and there it all is instantaneous one other really pet irritation about this car is the button for the for the windscreen washers is actually on the end of the column store where the the indicators are so sometimes when you're not concentrating you go for the indicators you tend to like wash your windscreen okay slightly pedantic point but there you go [Applause] there's some really solid fundamentals here the underlying chassis balance feels great the the steering is very quick to turn in rather tesla like in that respect there's some adjustability on the throttle if you like that sort of thing and it feels very well balanced i suspect a lot of our issues here are really because of the tires rather than because the fundamental setup of the car it it feels like there's a there's a huge amount of potential here that the fundamentals are great and yeah there's a lot to work with [Applause] the other big part of our process is the now famous or depending on your point of view infamous edmonds ev range test we drive every electric car on a real world loop from our office in santa monica california testing how far they'll travel on a single charge but of course the pr marketing point of this car was its extraordinary epa range figure this car after all is called the lucid air dream range edition so welcome back head of testing jonathan to reveal the official globally famous edmunds real world ev range testing result jonathan well uh lucid says that according to the epa this car is supposed to go 520 miles and we went drumroll 505 miles which is pretty incredible don't you think yeah i mean it immediately goes to the top of our range testing leaderboard beating the eqs i believe and it's the first car we tested that beat 500 miles exactly uh eqs uh certainly you know outperformed its original estimates but i mean this you know it's still 422 miles lucid 505 miles is a fair bit amount more um and like you said you know the first the first ev to do that but it does mean however good the result is that lucid joins tesla in being just about the only brands that we've tested that don't hit the epa numbers now we understand that's because they do the five-cycle test rather than the two-cycle test but hey what does that mean in the real world so essentially the five-cycle test is just a more involved test that gives a more favorable correction to the end result but what we've seen is that with the five cycle tests we have a lot of trouble meeting those results in the real world so it's just less accurate for the consumer and this is the problem and why we do our independent range testing that manufacturers can pretty much choose what kind of tests that they do the two cycle or the physical and they self-certify that's why we exist and why you should check out edmunds.com range for all the great work that jonathan and his team do promo over let's carry on most of the headlines right now focus on range but a car's efficiency tells you how much it'll cost to run and we measure that too the lucid consumed 28.3 kilowatt hours per 100 miles on our range loop think of that as a kind of mpg that's more than the epa claims but better than both the mercedes eqs450 plus and the tesla plaid beating the eqs is particularly impressive the 450 plus has just one motor rear wheel drive and horsepower 600 horsepower less than the all-wheel drive lucid regular viewers of our channel or those with a porsche on for twitter might remember that we use the low grip surface here at our track to demonstrate the tesla yoke the aircraft style wheel fitted to the model s plaid it did not go well so now in the interest of fairness and equality we're returning to the same track in the lucid air dream now it might look like familiar asphalt but it's actually a special low grip surface that simulates the effect of ice and allows you to explore a car's dynamic repertoire at low speed so let's put it into sprint for the whole 933 horsepower and let's turn off the stability control do i want to accept all the gubbins yes give me the liability and away we go a sunday setting in california i love this time of day apparently on this software setting it's impossible to fully turn off the stability control but apparently lucid are working on ways of actually giving you more control which allows you to do a little bit more silliness and drifting but as you can see this is already infinitely better than tesla's yoke which is probably the most stupid automotive idea i've known in 20 years in the business this is a proper steering wheel and when you need to be deal with agility like this of course using pretty much all the sides of it as the tyres warm up a little bit we are starting to get a bit more drift action and as you can see it's pretty controllable i don't know what's happened to the software but she's certainly doing a thing and as you can see a real steering wheel is actually infinitely preferable to a yoke who knew at the end of the day both literally and metaphorically there is so so much to like about this car does it have the potential to be a world beater absolutely the fundamentals really are that good and it instantly makes a tesla model s look what it is old but and it's a significant but right now it just doesn't feel finished we've no doubt that the software issues can and surely will be fixed with over-the-air updates but we really hope that lucid solves some of the quality issues too right now it's like the proverbial prodigal son truth is that car shoppers spending more than a hundred grand on a luxury sedan expect and deserve a certain standard car shoppers like us at edmonds as editor-in-chief i've just signed off spending 139 000 of our own cash on a lucid grand touring because we want to follow the evolution of the car like a real shopper and it's arriving very soon will lucy get it right and will this car fulfill its undeniable potential probably certainly hope so [Music] you

Channel: Edmunds Cars

Views: 365,158

Keywords: lucid air, lucid air dream edition, luxury electric cars, electric cars, lucid air car, electric cars 2022, lucid air price, electric vehicle, lucid air interior, new electric cars, lucid motors interior, future electric cars, lucid air dream, lucid car interior, lucid interior, lucid air vs tesla, lucid air review, lucid air electric car, lucid air release date, new ev cars, electric luxury cars, electric sedan, lucid air sedan, new electric cars 2022, lucid air cost

Id: Lj9-fkJJH70

Length: 29min 49sec (1789 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 21 2022