Can the Lucid Air unseat the Tesla Model S?
Lucid’s sedan is sublime to drive, if a bit strange in appearance. Can the Air unseat the Tesla Model S as the leader in the luxury EV market?The Lucid Air is the first product from the California-based company.When you’re an automotive journalist, sometimes you spend a few hours testing a car and are left with such a negative impression that you wonder for days whether you were maybe just in a bad mood.
The glass roof means plenty of headroom up front. Things are a little more limited vertically in the rear but still adequate, while the legroom in the rear is so generous, it’s borderline obscene. The Air would make for a great limousine if you didn’t have to fold yourself like a pretzel to get into the rear seat. That roofline swings mighty low.Touchscreens abound here, and they’re beautifully positioned and laid out.
Far and away the biggest issue, though, is the lack of either Android Auto or Apple CarPlay. Lucid promises both are coming soon, but we’ve been hearing that for a while now.To get the Air on the road, you simply press the right stalk down to engage drive, like on a Mercedes-Benz, and away you go. The Air GT’s default drive mode is called Smooth, and that is the right name for it. This car is incredibly calming to drive.
But I actually didn’t mind that since it’s this kind of system that might actually get people to put down their phones and drive. The part Imind was the car simultaneously warning me that my hand wasn’t on the steering wheel even when it very definitely was. I had to give the wheel the ol’ Autopilot Adjustment every minute or so, a little wiggle to let it know I was still holding on. That the car can track the exact direction of pupils but not the sheer presence of my hands is perplexing.
By way of context, I put about 50 miles of testing on the car before going on a two-hour road trip out to Vermont. It was about 30 degrees Fahrenheit out when I left, which is murder on most EVs batteries. After getting back from this 200-mile jaunt, the Air was still showing 163 miles of remaining range. That’s more than a Nissan Leaf has when fully charged.
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