Why I leased a Lucid Air and YOU should too!

hello and welcome to a cloud and also my new Lucid air touring I just leased this car a week ago and I've already put about 600 700 miles on it so let's get straight to the point here why does nobody seem to want a lucid [Music] air ever since the Lucid air started shipping at the very end of 2021 it has been incred R almost universally well reviewed designed to compete with the Tesla Model S Porsche tyan Mercedes eqs and another BMW i5 and i7 it's a pretty packed lineup but the Lucid seems to have a lot going for it number one is the range the entry-level pure trim offers 400 m of range and my touring with slightly larger Wheels is rated at 384 we also have 620 horsepower from an all-wheel drive dual motor system which can Propel this thing from 0 to 60 in 3 seconds flat launch mode activated and off we go oh man that thing is quick and it's wrapped in a pretty attractive looking package given that this is the most aerodynamic car on sale today but I am curious of these five cars which do you think is the best looking let me know in the comments below but despite all of that lucid's stock price has been absolutely plummeting and they've been failing to hit their deliveries and in recent months they've even had excess inventory so it's not even manufacturing thing people just aren't buying them until now because uh well I bought that one specifically I leased it because right now Lucid has some pretty unbelievable lease incentives on these things so my monthly payment with everything included the monthly the down payment taxes title registration everything is 850 a month and for the money you get an insane amount of luxury features starting up front where we have soft closed doors heated and ventilated front seats a panoramic glass roof that goes all the way over your head rear window sun shades also known as peasant blockers am I allowed to say that and that of course includes a rear sun shade as well we also get a power opening frunk very schnazzy and mine is finished in what's known as the stealth package which blacks out the roof and the mirrors and the wheels and the front uh beak I want to say yeah I really like it in this stealth package but the normal one kind of reminds me of the old Acura TL and that's probably not a good thing but uh overall I do quite like the styling of this car I think Lucid have done a really great job at packaging what is the most aerodynamic car on sale right now so it's living proof then that aerodynamic and efficient EVS don't have to be hideous monstrosities and with the least deals that you can get on these things right now I think this is the best EV for the money hands down but that doesn't mean that it's not without its issues for example the configurating tool for the Lucid air is a mess there are way too many options compared to Tesla where you basically just pick your color and your wheels and as such my car which has an MSRP of $95,000 is missing some pretty key things for one I only have the base sound system which is honestly fine but I have a rattling rear subwoofer [Music] which is a little bit of a bummer and I only have lucid's base dream drive system which has adaptive cruise but no Lane keep assist and it doesn't have any of these surround view cameras so I just have to stare at these blank placeholders in the mirrors all day but most of those complaints are balanced out by just how nice this car feels now sitting inside the Lucid air is just a wonderful place to be they really knocked it out of the park with the materials choices this I would say is the most underst ated interior color it's the Mojave Napo leather and even though it's a black and gray color scheme we still have a really nice variety of materials and I really like the way that lucid has this all laid out we have this big 34in curved screen with some hard function keys on the left those don't move we have a very simple instrument cluster that shows the Speed Charge Power song that is playing and a trip computer and then to the right we have what is in my opinion the least successful part of this combination the almost triangular infotainment display and the problem with it really is just the shape it doesn't really make sense I'm a Big Apple carplay user but it looks absolutely ridiculous on this tiny little screen with all that blank space around it I need binoculars to see that from all the way back here and if I want to reach out and touch it I mean look how far away that is you have to like Lean Forward definitely not intuitive Apple carplay whether it's the car's fault or Apple's fault does get on my nerves a little bit there's a couple of things that have really bothered me like for example sometimes when I get in and start playing music the phone will connect to the Bluetooth key for the car not carplay so that means that I won't have any audio I have to go in and switch it over to the car there's also a really annoying bug where every once in a while the music just won't play like you can hit the play button but it won't play and again it's hard to tell whether this is an issue with iOS or with the car itself but it's annoying either way but for fortunately to ease my frustration there's another screen right below it and this is really well executed this is essentially the home screen if you will this is what shows when you get in the car by default and it allows you to very quickly change Drive modes open the trunk and the frunk adjust the steering wheel and mirrors you can even adjust the brightness of the whole system just very very easily at the top here there's an openings Tab and this is honestly a little bit redundant we've got trunk and frunk again the charge port again but there there's a hard button for that on the left side screen so don't really need to use that the only really useful buttons are the rear sun shade and the child door and window locks back here the next tab is seats now there are seat adjustment buttons on the side of the seat so you don't need to come in here all that much but if you want to extend the thigh support you can get more fine control of the lumbar and you can save and restore profiles do the passenger seat as well you can do that in here again you don't really need to come in here very much also up top we have themes there's different colors for the ambient lighting and the sort of color background of the center screen as well and then we have a charging tab which allows you to start preconditioning open the charge port yet again that's like the third place to do that you can set the charge limit and you can schedule charging so if you have a home charger you can say all right let's only start at 959 so a pretty simple system there if we move over to the right we've got climate control now the thing that I love about this car is we do have hard buttons up here for fan speed and temperature so for the most part you can just get by using those but if you want to turn on the heated or cooled seats if you want to change where the air is coming out of or the sink or what have you you can come in here for that and then over here we've got settings and this is just like a very simple iOS style settings menu which allows you to really get very granular and it really lets you change just about anything you can put the tire pressure in kill a pascals if you really wanted to I don't know why I mean look at all of these Drive settings it even lets you turn off the stability control which is kind of surprising and you can go in here for the driver assistance menus and if you don't like any of these driver's assistance things that modern cars have you can literally just go in here and turn them all off it is really really nice that they let you do that even the forward Collision protection I I wouldn't personally turn that off but you can if you want to and the luxury doesn't stop when you get in the back seat either this car has the most leg room that I have ever experienced in any car ever I'm 6'1 and I'm sitting behind my driver's seat position but it's almost laughable that I even need to say that because I could park a bus back here and still have room and another added bonus of the mid-range touring trim level is because it has less battery packs you actually get a lower floor back here so your feet can be a little lower down which improves the seating position [Music] all right so let's recap so far we've got a $95,000 car that's leasing for $ 850 a month that has a really really Upscale Interior with a lot of luxury features phenomenal packaging I mean I didn't even talk about the huge trunk and the massive frunk in addition to the really well-laid out cabin we've got pretty good software with a couple of notable weak points and this thing is ludicrously fast oh man that thing is quick but one of lucid's big selling points is range so I charged the battery up to 80% which was surprisingly showing 38 Mi of range let's put that to the test now I should mention that according to Lucid forums people have noticed that after 1 to 2,000 mil their range and efficiency does increase and I've only done at this point like 200 miles so definitely keep that in mind and we might end up doing a full range test video a little bit later but for this test efficiency was not my goal at all I did a little bit of nighttime highway driving at over 70 mph we also had some Daytime City traffic and a fair amount of daytime highway traffic as well and look I'm not going to lie to you guys I was doing launches left and right because this thing is so much fun and I love fast electric cars so look I'm just going to be upfront about that but I will say I was initially quite annoyed with the Bluetooth phone key I found that it would take way too long to actually unlock the car and I'd just be standing there looking like an idiot and then one time I went down to my parking garage and I just could not get in at all like literally stood there for 5 minutes and nothing but I pulled out the app and it looks like it had updated so I had to go out of the parking garage to get cell signal to reconnect to the app and then when I came back in like it kind of fixed the problem I don't really know how that works but ever since that update the car has been unlocking pretty much right when I walk up to it so my complaints are literally being addressed as I'm reviewing the car you got to love startup EVS man and as my range test continued I was noticing a lot more 50 m and when we initially unplugged at 80% it was showing 300 Mi so definitely overestimated that but still 80 to 13% that's 200 mil not bad I will say I was hoping for a little bit more range but we'll see if that improves and probably revisit this in a future video but either way the range is good and this thing drives extremely nicely the first question that I asked when I test drove this car initially was is this thing riding on air suspension because it really feels like it is but it isn't it's using adaptive dampers but they're conventional Springs you wouldn't know though because this thing is incredibly smooth and silky and really really easy to drive the one pedal driving in this thing is also the best that I have ever used oh and by the way this thing is fast oh man it sure does Sprint and it's so funny cuz every time I do this like it's not going to come across on camera at all because there's no sound it's just so so quiet and smooth now personally I don't think you should have three different Drive modes and I don't like that you have to confirm every time you want to put it in Sprint but if we take it back into smooth mode here this is a really really well-laid out cabin if I want to adjust the temperature all I have to do is hit a couple buttons that fall very easily to hand you can just poke them over there you don't have to go tapping away on the screen same with volume I've got a roller here in the center and a uh thumb switch here on the wheel but uh to be honest I don't really like this switch because it's just like a single up or down and it doesn't change the volume fast enough if you need to actually make a legitimate adjustment you you want to just use the wheel like that so I kind of wish that this was just a wheel but either way very simple and easy to use we've got fast forward and Rewind we've got a Siri button here if you're in carplay and then cruise control on the left all right we got to do a quick launch just put your foot on the brake be in Sprint mode hit the gas launch mode activated and off we go oh man that thing is quick oh it hooks up so fast and again that's probably going to look really stupid when I watch this back because there's no sound so you really have to experience it to know what it's like but you know if you've driven an EV you already know so we've got a nice looking package great luxury features it begs the question again why aren't people buying these things I think at the end of the day it comes down to a couple of key factors number one is that the EV bubble has kind of burst a little bit the electric car market was really hot in 2021 and it has cooled off substantially and that especially applies for high-end luxury sedans the market in general is Shifting towards SUVs but a luxury sedan that might have worked well for Tesla 12 Years A go with the model S but now I think there's less demand in that segment it's also pretty saturated as we discussed earlier so people shopping for an electric sedan have a lot of choices and then there's the price while the entry-level Lucid air does undercut the Model S's pricing my air touring is 95 Grand and quite frankly I don't think it's worth $20,000 more than a Tesla Model S long range however on the flip side of that with the least Inc Ines that lucid have right now this is a ridiculously good deal if you wanted to lease a Tesla you're looking at about 1300 a month with 2,000 down that's almost 500 a month more than my effective monthly payment and when you put it like that I think the Lucid looks really good in that comparison the build quality the luxury features the range and the performance are all extremely competitive while also being less expensive so I think the Lucid air touring is a phenomenal car for the money and I definitely recommend going to test drive one seeing what the local incentives are in your area it just might be one of the best deals you can get on an EV right now and I really hope that lucid is able to keep this going because they absolutely nailed it with their first car and I cannot wait to see what they continue to do in future models so I hope you guys enjoyed this video let me know in the comments down below what you think of the Lucid air touring and I'll see you in the next one one [Music]

Channel: The Middle Lane

Views: 118,467

Keywords: ev, tesla, lucid, tesla vs lucid, lucid air, ev stock, best ev, ev sedan, car review, range test

Id: p3b38JxbW8E

Length: 15min 49sec (949 seconds)

Published: Tue May 07 2024