2025 Lucid Air Review: Unnecessarily Fast, Astonishingly Efficient

August 19, 2024

Sebastian Blanco

As amazing as the Lucid Air is to drive – and it is amazing – it doesn’t hold a candle to hearing CEO Peter Rawlinson explain exactly why his company’s all-electric sedans are, well, amazing. Rawlinson isn’t just the CEO at Lucid. His history as vice president of vehicle engineering at Tesla and chief engineer of the Model S, as well as stints at Lotus, Jaguar and technology consulting firm Corus Automotive, help explain his other title at Lucid: chief technology officer.

During a visit to Lucid HQ earlier this year, Rawlinson eagerly held court to explain the Air’s incredible efficiency numbers and why they matter.

“This car is 4.74 miles per kWH, so no one else is even close to that,” he told SAE Media. “This is the most sustainable car in the world, in terms of energy utilization. Going from A to B, this car will use less energy than anything else on the market.”

Rawlinson said the Air Pure AWD trim is more efficient than the impressive Mercedes Vision EQXX, which Rawlinson called “very artificial” because of all of the compromises Mercedes had to make in the concept vehicle, like narrow tires and a sparse interior. Earlier this year, Lucid announced it had achieved tests in the Air that returned over 5 miles per kWh, which Rawlinson told SAE Media would mean reaching the same range with smaller batteries. There’s much more to be had on the efficiency front, Rawlinson believes.

“My vision is to get to six miles per kWh, and I think that’s what’s gonna save the planet because then you can have a car with 180-mile range with just a 30 kWh pack, now you change the design of the car,” he said. “The paradox is that the long-range EVs of now, this decade, and the EVs of the future will have less range, [because] they’ll cost less and the chemistry will accept the charge faster and the charging network will be much more mature and fully built out. Then, what’s wrong with 180-mile EV? If you can get six miles per kWh, that’s a 30 kWh pack to get the 180-mile range, and then it’s a tiny pack. That’s maybe a $4,000-$5,000 pack, and then you can make a truly affordable EV. I think we could do that in the next couple of years. We can get to five miles this year, for something like [the Air], and for a smaller, family car, we could do six miles maybe 18 months from now, two years from now.”

Lucid is also improving its line-up of Air trim levels, even as the various trims keep their differences hidden behind matching sheet metal. The Pure and Sapphire updates, for example, were developed at the same time and Lucid engineers had to develop their own traction control system for these EVs, because the supplier version didn’t perform well enough. The motors in the Grand Touring trim are like version 1.5 – maybe not quite different enough to be considered v2.0, Lucid representatives said – as the engineers continue to improve their understanding of how magnetic fields effect operation and the amount of resistance different coatings have on copper wires. Or take the 38-mm (1.3-in) aluminum busbars in the Air’s battery.

“We’ve got the shortest busbars on the planet,” he said. “Originally, these were about eight inches long, and I cannot tell you the pain that the engineers went through. ‘We got them down to six inches, Peter,’ and I said that’s not going to fly. ’It’s down to four inches and it’s killing us.’ ‘This is not good enough, I want them like half an inch and it went this went for months and months and months trying to reduce the length of the busbars because the shorter they are, the more efficient they are, because the electrons don’t have to flows so far. And it’s like, ‘“What difference does this make?” I don’t know. It’s tiny, but you have to do it.”

Tiny improvements, huge performance

Details of these small improvements that Lucid engineers made throughout the Air easily slip the mind when you get behind the wheel. A spacious interior welcomed me no matter which of the four Air trims I tested on a sunny day earlier this year, and the obvious headline is that it’s impossible to miss the difference between the 1,234 hp (920 kW) Sapphire trim with its three permanent-magnet motors (one on the front axle and a twin rear-drive unit in back) and the 430 hp (320 kW) Pure base model with a single motor mounted on the rear axle. During an afternoon testing the Air lineup in the redwoods outside San Francisco, the extra oomph was an unquestionable high. No EV – or any new vehicle of any type – has impressed me quite as much as the Sapphire did on first impression. That’s what a 0-60 mph (97 km/h) time of just 1.89 seconds is meant to do. But all of that extra power comes at a price. The Pure starts at $69,900, compared to the $249,000 for the Sapphire. As breathtaking as they are, the extra thrills that come with each accelerator push are not worth the extra $180,000. As the rare car reviewer who believes a 4.5 second 0-60 time is more than enough, I found the Pure to be simply delightful and for sure the one I would choose.

Compared to the popular (in the right zip codes) Mercedes-Benz EQS and the now-plentiful Tesla Model S, the Air brings with it a whiff of exclusivity. But Lucid stands outr as an engineering marvel, as well, and offers a worthwhile driving experience. The adaptive damping suspension has less to balance in the 4,564-lb (2,070-kg) Pure than in the 5,336-lb (2,420-kg) Sapphire, but all trims felt entirely planted and connected to the roads zipping by underneath. Advanced torque vectoring gives all Air variants impressive wheel grip, and steering feel is appropriately tight and responsive across the board.

Design meets engineering

Engineers for Lucid work just steps away from where the company’s designers create. Lucid’s Silicon Valley headquarters features a two-story lab that can hold up to four full-size clay models on the design shop floor, where the CAD team also works. Other engineers work upstairs, in an open loft overlooking the models, and the layout is meant to create organic interactions that should end up creating a better EV.

“People don’t realize this, but engineers design the car as well,” Rawlinson. “Often, you see a concept car and it never reaches the light of day because the engineers ‘ruin it.’ Well, maybe it was never designed to be feasible in the first place. We’ve got advanced engineering upstairs and design downstairs. And we’re truly designing cars, engineering and design together.”

Rawlinson said Lucid engineers have “explored pretty close to the limit” what they can do for now to improve the efficiency and miniaturization of components in the Air and Lucid’s upcoming Gravity SUV. But that doesn’t mean he’s not ready for more updates in future Lucid EVs.

“Everyone thought electric powertrains were so small compared to gasoline, and they were all excited,” he said. “But what we did was say, let’s see how far we can push this, and we made it a lot smaller again. I think there’s diminishing returns. If we see advances in battery technology where we get more volumetric energy density – in other words, how many kilowatts per liter – then the battery pack can be smaller, and then we’ll see another advance.”

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