LUCID AIR ELECTRIC CAR DRIVERS
LUCID AIR ELECTRIC CAR FREE

Sixty miles an hour arrives in 2.5 seconds, testing shows. But the Lucid is never short on thrills, and is more spacious inside. Route 9W, the wintry narrows of the Hudson River going blurry below.Ī Porsche Taycan, driven on the same roads, reiterated its status as the market’s purest-handling E.V.

LUCID AIR ELECTRIC CAR FREE

That included a free fall down the shoulders of Storm King Mountain on U.S. The number reads like a misprint, and feels like tripping out a Cessna’s door without a parachute. This EQS (from $120,105, or $135,300 with options) felt swift - until the Lucid Air Dream Performance whisked me away with 1,111 ridiculous horsepower from its dual motors. And it nearly triples the power density, or horsepower per pound, of Tesla’s best.įor the German competition, I drove an EQS 580 with 516 horsepower and a 4.1-second dash to 60 miles an hour. The entire unit fits in an airline carry-on bag. Lucid’s powder keg - including an electric motor, single-speed transmission and inverter - spools up to 650 horsepower and weighs 163 pounds. With an eight-speed transmission, the powertrain weighs over 800 pounds. The V-8 engine in a new Corvette makes 495 horsepower. “And it’s important for a chief engineer to be truly empowered to call the shots.” “We started Model S with six engineers, which is unheard-of,” he said. But he noted how many skeptics assumed Tesla would fail spectacularly in 2009, when he joined the company.

Rawlinson acknowledges the hurdles ahead for any company hoping to replicate Tesla’s (so far) unparalleled rise. Lucid intends to follow up with a Gravity sport utility vehicle next year, the first in a planned lineup-and-factory expansion to achieve a 500,000-vehicle annual capacity by 2030. “We did it by taking a ground-up review of what was possible from an E.V.” Rawlinson said, referring to a real-world, highway-speed range test conducted by. “We just got 500 miles of range at 70 m.p.h. (The Benz’s fastest charging rate is 200 kilowatts.)

has charged faster, adding up to 300 miles in 20 minutes on a 350-kilowatt charger. tech where it counts: No electric has gone farther on a charge. Yet this blank-slate company has advanced E.V. Put up against Mercedes’s dynastic heritage and scale, Lucid is an obscure underdog. The Lucid’s most efficient version can go about 50 percent farther, enough for about two and a half more hours of highway driving. Despite its aero profile, the EQS has a range maxing out at 350 miles, per its government rating. But Lucid’s Air is virtually as slippery, and manages to look great. Mercedes says the EQS is the world’s most aerodynamic production car. The Lucid is 11 inches shorter, yet easily fits lanky rear-seat riders, and brings the industry’s largest frunk. Mercedes posits the EQS as an alternative to its S-Class flagship yet taller adults find their noggins squashed in a cramped back seat, and there’s no storage “frunk” as in many engine-free E.V.s. tropes: the ovum-shaped transportation pod, blown up to Benzian proportions. The EQS’s inelegant styling adheres to that most played-out of E.V. What’s missing is any innovation that advances electric driving.įirst impressions don’t help. But too much EQS tech is showboating gadgetry that might be applied to any gasoline car, like its overwrought 56-inch Hyperscreen display and ambient lighting that pours from every crevice, in 64 selectable colors. The EQS drives beautifully, as you’d expect of any six-figure Mercedes, from wizardly rear-wheel steering to what must be the quietest cabin of any E.V.

LUCID AIR ELECTRIC CAR DRIVERS

Not when automobiles are being digitized and revolutionized, and new generations of drivers aren’t always impressed by old names and ways.Īs for which company holds the more relevant institutional knowledge, consider Lucid’s founder, Peter Rawlinson: He was the engineering brains behind Tesla’s world-changing Model S. And a comparison test of Lucid’s sedan against the 2022 Mercedes-Benz EQS - the first all-electric sedan from the company that essentially invented the automobile in the late 19th century - favors a divergent view: A century-plus of experience in building internal-combustion cars doesn’t necessarily mean squat. Yet it’s two California start-ups that have just begun delivering the past year’s most significant new E.V.s, the Lucid Air and the Rivian R1T pickup. The spin is that, once these slumbering Atlases get off the mat, their global heft and know-how will let them flood showrooms with electric vehicles - and narrow the gap with Tesla, which claimed 936,000 sales worldwide in 2021. Legacy automakers, facing years of unkind comparisons with a boom-timey Tesla, have fallen back on a defensive refrain: Just you wait.

Lucid air electric car