Lucid Air | Lucid Motors
The cars look nice, but what is the down and dirty? The claim is max horsepower 1080, projected range 517 miles, and 0 to 60 in 2 and a half minutes. The website is very pretty, but are there any complications they aren’t talking about?
Seeing as they don’t have anything in production yet do you really think they’re going to talk abut ‘complications’ unless that 0-60 time is true (I know it’s not…)
However, they’ve been around for a while under another name and are best known for supplying batteries to Formula E race cars so sit back, enjoy the ride and see what pops up later.
Well, at >1000 hp for a normal sized saloon car, 2.5 seconds sounds about right in theory. The problem might be stopping the thing taking off.
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starts at 70k and goes up to 161k.
For a car that price, these features aren’t really that extravagant.
also the 0-60 speeds aren’t much different than the Tesla ludicrous mode speeds.
But the range is a bit higher than Tesla.
the lucid air has a 113kwh battery, Tesla is closer to 60-100kwh.
But battery prices have dropped, I think they are near $100 per kwh now so an extra ~30 kwh of batteries themselves is only a few thousand dollars.
I have a good friend who left the vehicle calibration team at Bosch to go work at Lucid, just a few months ago actually. I asked him the same questions, not being terribly concerned about his career (he’s young and childless and can bounce back easily if they go under), but still wanting to make sure he wasn’t being foolish. He said he was skeptical as well but that it’s a solid product and, as pointed out above, not exactly a fly-by-night scam or anything.
I think their big hurdle right now is that they’re not Tesla. I’ll cop to being very surprised that Tesla was able to plow their their production, quality, and timeline issues without the backing of a major automaker. Lucid has to work through the same growing pains without the benefit of the near constant press Tesla received for being “first.”
Some of the execs at Lucid Motors are former Tesla staff, so they’re not starting from scratch as much as you’d expect. And they’re one of several EV competitors out there. There’s also Rivian, Faraday, Polestar, and a bunch in China. It may be that the shift from IC engines opens the auto manufacturing business beyond the existing companies?
As battery power density goes up, range gets longer. As battery power/$ goes up, the incremental cost of installing more range goes down. As motor power density (weight/power, size/power, and $/power) and tire size goes up, the 0-60 times get shorter. Those specs are driven by different aspects of the total design and the different techs moving at different rates of progress.
One thing’s for sure: regardless of vehicle brand or battery tech, you’re not going to get the max advertised range by doing 0-to-ludicrous when departing each stoplight. Fun though that may be.
At a very high arm-waving level it sounds like Lucid is using plausible performance numbers for a clean sheet design from 2020, not 2015.
I’m not in the biz, so I can’t speak to the production issues. But they’re always huge unless you’re hand-building supercars for the 0.01%.