Lucid Air Grand Touring Performance Review - Tesla: Reinvented | 4K

I don't need much skill to win a race against those law I don't even need to be in the driver's seat [Music] the best stories have two sides the side we all know and expect and a hidden background that most people had no idea existed a perfect example of that is the truly fascinating new Lucid air Grand Touring and Grand Touring performance one car with two distinct sights and I say that for good reason people might look at this Lucid air Grand Touring and think it's yet another one-dimensional electric car from some random startup that no one's ever heard of and usually they follow a very similar recipe they're ugly they're heavy and they're full of technology that no one really needs there is a little bit of that going on here but scratch below the surface and you'll find there's more to the Lucid air than meets the eye first there's the origin story which is a cracker Elon Musk takes over Tesla and hires the best engineers in the business those engineers get fed up with the way Elon does things and jump ship to do it their own way Lucy's Chief technology officer is Peter Rawlinson the former chief engineer of the model S who escaped the clutches of Tesla to become the boss at Lucid setting up in California the company specialized in building powertrains and batteries for other vehicle manufacturers and get this Lucid designs develops manufactures and supplies battery packs for generation 2 formula e-race teams in collaboration with McLaren Applied Technologies and Sony that means this road car is running on technology honed on the racetrack the Grand Touring has 819 horsepower while the Grand Touring performance delivers 1050 horsepower and that can only mean one thing devastating performance [Music] the Mustang the Corvette Z06 and the Lucid only two of those names has any relevance in American Sports Car history and yet with its 1050 horsepower the Lucid has as much power as the Corvette and the Mustang put together with as much power as a small European hatchback to spare and that means I don't need much skill to win a race against those laws I don't even need to be in the driver's seat [Music] nearly closed my laptop there right time to catch up on some email as well you know I Destroyer Corvette Z06 and a Mustang productive so what exactly is the Lucid air well it comes in several forms including the entry level pure the slightly more powerful touring and the two cars you see here the Grand Touring the gray car and the Grand Touring performance the white car we brought to the track all are beautiful to look at with a Sleek overall design although I wouldn't say this car is without its faults things that annoy me and there are a couple first of all panel gaps we often give Tesla a little bit of stick should we say for having panel gaps in their cars and that applies to Lucid as well look at that little Gap there and there and these gaps are actually larger on the other side and have a look at this Whopper back here that she Park a bus in that secondly there are three ways to lock or unlock this car one is with the app the other way is to use a keypad or rather a key card which you hold against the B pillar to lock it or to unlock it I wonder where they got that from Tesla and the third way is to use a key fob now very very complicated because there's only one button on this thing press it once to lock double tap to unlock long press to open the boot press and hold to open the front or is that the other way around other way around yeah and the other thing that's really annoying is how sensitive the key is it uses keyless entry so when you walk away it will lock and walk towards it it will unlock but it just seems to randomly open and close regardless of what you're doing it's a bit much [Music] the interior though is wonderful including the rear of the cabin which has huge amounts of leg and Headroom a totally flat floor and a stunning sunroof that bathes the cabin in light the materials are glorious too with a rich tapestry of wool wood leather and Alcantara cheap plastic is almost nowhere to be found and then there's the tech which is very very good I love this curved display sitting up on top of the dashboard it split up into a load of different sections so on the far left hand side you've got shortcut buttons for unlocking the charge port which is important because you can't unlock it on the outside by pressing it don't like that very much there's also a shortcut button for locking and unlocking the doors and opening and closing the front trunk you've also got buttons for demisting the front and rear windows your lights and your wipers easily accessible at all times and then there's a central display which is nice and clear everything's visible looks fantastic and on the right hand side a smallish infotainment screen now this is actually very easy to use you've got the home button up at the top left shortcut buttons for Sirius XM radio in this case and also your media playback which in this case includes AM FM radio Bluetooth Spotify and tidal now tidal includes lossless stream gaming and that's important because this car actually has Dolby Atmos so the sound system in here is brilliant now bring your eyes to this lower screen down here which gives you shortcut access to a load of other functions in the car including your drive modes smooth Swift and Sprint massaging which I find very very powerful so let me press that start button you might actually be able to hear this listen take my mic off just hold it here for a second the motors are a bit too loud if you ask me well I don't know why it's beeping either now these two screens actually work together for example if I press the navigation button up top and I think that this screen's a bit too small for it I can actually drag that down from the top screen to the bottom screen to give me a little bit more screen real estate that's not the only cool feature press this bottom tab down here and then hit the retract button and the screen actually folds away to give you a load of storage space down there that is very cool still don't know why it's beeping though one thing there is absolutely no confusion about is this car's performance yes it will demolish 670 horsepower Corvettes for breakfast and Mustangs for lunch with its staggering 2.6 second or to 60 time but it's also very capable in the bends [Music] I think most people will agree that while EVS are incredibly talented when it comes to straight line acceleration they tend to fall down in other areas particularly when you introduce them to braking and cornering but actually this Lucid air Grand Touring performance is incredibly impressive right let's get some speed on here as we approach your braking Zone hard on the anchors that's pretty impressive I mean this is using steel brakes rather than carbon Ceramics but the stopping power is definitely there it's also fairly consistent I mean if you're pounding around doing lap after lap of hard braking eventually the pedal is going to go long but for Road use or occasional track use this is surprisingly impressive on the brakes and then there's the cornering into this first turn right here it doesn't feel quite as direct as say a Porsche taikan not quite as communicative in terms of the feedback you get from that front end but it's actually pretty precise you can place the car right where you want it and even though it's not communicating in terms of when it's running out of grip the grip levels are actually fairly strong on these Pirelli P0 tires coilovers rather than air suspension really works in its favor not only do coilovers help keep the weight to a minimum but they also make the car feel quicker to respond to Direction changes and also a lot more natural in the corners I'm also a big fan of the fact that this thing doesn't use 48 volt active roll stabilization because those systems they prop up the outer wheel and they eliminate the natural role that you get in the car but with this Everything feels organic it's actually lovely in the vents positive then but what about when things go wrong in my time with both these test cars I encountered a few minor software glitches which admittedly could be easily fixed with a restart that beeping you heard in the cabin earlier was due to gravel becoming trapped in one of the rear brake calipers causing a glitch in the parking brake although to be clear that wasn't lucid's fault I also suffered a flat tire that needed a full replacement as there's no spare but the good news is that lucid was on the case quickly sending out a technician to get us back on the road faults can happen in any car of course but it's reassuring that such a young company has systems in place to resolve them whether you're on the racetrack or on the road it's definitely worth reiterating how good the quality of the materials are in the Grand Touring because that goes such a long way to making the Driving Experience so much nicer we're seeing a general Trend nowadays of car manufacturers cutting corners on interior quality but that's not the case here everything inside this car looks and feels high quality and I don't think you can say the same about a Tesla this thing is light years ahead these seats are amazingly comfortable perfect for long Journeys but they're also quite supportive and offer a lot of adjustment you can move them forward backward up down and also adjust the bolsters to hug you in place just to make you feel more secure around the bends I know I had a bit of a moment about the massage feature earlier on but to be honest that noise only happens in one particular mode the unwind mode and actually unwind is the best massage I've had in any car it's so powerful it massages your upper back your lower back your bum your thighs everything just gets a good squeeze which is more than can be said of the massage feature in so many other cars it's also very refined quiet obviously although I don't think Lucid have gone to too much trouble to cover up the noise of the electric motors you can definitely hear them whenever you accelerate or decelerate it's smooth too although perhaps not quite as silky as some of its high-end Rivals thanks to their avoidance of air suspension the coilovers fitted here though offer more than acceptable ride quality not the finest but certainly good enough maybe the thing that might surprise most people is the efficiency and the range in the Lucid air Grand Touring this is one of the most efficient electric cars on the planet it has a 112 kilowatt hour battery pack a decent size but more importantly it also has a low drag coefficient of around 0.2 and that means it gets incredible range this thing can achieve over 516 miles and that believe it or not isn't an absurd claim in our time with it the necessary 4.6 miles per kilowatt hour is more than possible depending on how you drive it of course but with so much performance on offer there will always be the temptation to explore this car's more extreme sight and to compare it to the very best in this sector is it genuinely fun to drive well I don't think it will touch the likes of a BMW M5 CS for example especially in terms of outright grip braking and balance and of course fun Factor but you've got to remember the M5 CS was built by Munich's finest people with Decades of experience doing big performance saloons the Lucid air was built by a bunch of guys in California who the world thought didn't have the pedigree well I tell you what they might now it's a car of two seemingly incompatible sights but Lucid has pulled off the improbable delivering an electric car from a new brand with class-leading efficiency and range astonishing interior quality inventive technology and good Comfort levels alongside genuinely engaging performance the air isn't simply a rival to the likes of the model S but a genuine new threat [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] [Music]

Channel: AutoTrader

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Id: KOY8Hzmdgm0

Length: 14min 24sec (864 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 10 2023