A Quick Drive and More Tech Announcements
The ride was short, but provided the essentials—time split between the driver’s seat and the spacious back seat, the two defining spaces in the Lucid Air, the latest luxury electric car to arrive on the market.
This was a pre-production Dream Edition Range model, the actual car used by Lucid execs and Motor Trend magazine staff to demonstrate the car’s range by driving from LA to SF on a single charge. Customer cars are now flowing off the production lines at Lucid’s Arizona factory, so real world test drives are coming soon. Consider this a quick preview.
Quick is the operative word. Lucid’s two motors and 966 horsepower (in the Range model; the Performance version boasts more than 1,000 horsepower) move the Air smoothly and swiftly to the maximum speed allowed on any road. Road feel is solid and my relatively low-speed run barely teased the potential out of the car.
That’s from the front seat. The ride in back is another world. It’s designed for comfort, part of the car’s goal of making a market in China, where chauffeured high end cars (the initial Lucid models will retail for more than $160,000) are relatively common. Lucid makes a point of the Air having a full-size car’s interior packaged in a midsize car’s exterior. That design sleight of hand, made possible by an electric car’s flat floor reduced need for engine space, is evidently in the spacious leg and headroom.
An additional comment I would add is that the Lucid presents itself as a traditional luxury with full instrumentation in front of the driver and auxiliary controls and information on a hidden tablet that can be summoned with a quick touch. The trim pieces have all the right look and feel to impart to the buyer that he/she has purchased a six-figure car.
One feature struck me as particularly distinctive. While panoramic glass rooms are becoming quite common in the automotive community, the Lucid takes a slightly different approach to the idea. The sweep of the glass from the touchdown point on the hood is uninterrupted (other than by two seemingly floating sun visors) until it reaches a crossbar above and slightly behind the driver. It made for an expansive view of the exterior and enhanced the spacious feeling of the car’s interior.
More Tech
The battleground for the next round of EVs (the Lucid is only one of a dozen either just introduced or coming soon) has numerous fronts. Lucid has addressed two of those with its 1,000+ horsepower performance model and its companion 528-mile range model. The third area, another one in which Tesla has set the bar, is advanced driver assistance technology (ADAS).
The week after my brief test drive Lucid Group announced details on its DreamDrive driver assistance platform, a suite of technologies that will be standard on the high-end models like the Dream Edition I drove and optional on other models. Like Tesla’s misnamed Autopilot, it’s designed to allow hands-free driving under certain conditions. Unlike Tesla, which appears to be moving to a completely camera-based system, Lucid’s systems uses 32 on-board sensors, including the first use of lidar on a production vehicle.
The extensive variety of sensors will allow Lucid to offer more than 30 driver-assistance features, including collision avoidance, Traffic Jam assist and Highway Assist.
The sensors feeding the system include 14 visible-light cameras, five radar units, four surround view cameras, ultrasonic sensors around the vehicle’s exterior and a solid-state lidar sensor. Lucid describes the ultimate system, which will be able to grow in capability via over-the-air software updates, as an “invisible co-pilot.”
The DreamDrive system relies on the car’s proprietary on-board Ethernet Ring to enable quick response and will use the Lucid Air’s 21-speaker audio system to deliver directional alerts while presenting information on the graphic display.
Story by Michael Coates. Photos courtesy of Lucid Group.
More Lucid News:
News: Range Milestones Hit by Lucid
Feature: Lucid’s Studio Approach to Sales
News: Lucid Finally Unveils the Whole Air Package
News: Lucid Announces 500+ Mile Range
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