“S-Class space, E-Class size.”
It helps to have ambition when you intend to make a name for yourself, a new name, in a crowd of established, distinguished, and long-standing company. A fresh of breath air, if you’d like, tends to do just the trick, and that’s what Lucid intends to be.
Lucid is one of numerous new electric car companies trying to break into a segment that’s presently dominated by Tesla, and intend to make their presence felt by going after the big boys right at the get go. And by ‘big boys,’ we don’t mean Tesla or indeed the Model S; No, Lucid intends to go after luxury stalwarts that we’re all familiar with, like BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Jaguar.
The Air luxury saloon will be the marque’s first contender, and promises to offer limousine-levels of luxury with sports-car levels of agility, much like what many have said before of the Jaguar XJ. That’s hardly surprising though, given that Lucid’s engineering boss is Peter Rawlinson, who used to call Jaguar home (though he also said the same of Lotus and Tesla before joining the Lucid bandwagon). The low-set batteries and twin-motor all-wheel drive system, paired up to 725kW of kick, will require an able and nimble chassis to cope, so it’s a good thing that they have expertise at hand.
“The Air has been designed with enough flexibility to be future-proof. It’s the kind of car that lovers of driving will like to drive. Rawlinson is the best man for the job - he knows how to make a beautiful-handling car.” - David Salguero, Marketing Manager, Lucid Motors
Salguero made these remarks in a recent interview with Autocar, where he also revealed that the Lucid Air’s primary benchmark, interestingly, is not the Tesla that set the pace in the segment, rather the long-standing benchmarks in the luxury car class from Germany.
“By miniaturising the EV powertrain, we can make the Air small on the outside, but big on the inside. It will have a large, comfortable, spacious interior, comparable to the S-Class long-wheelbase, while being about the same size as an E-Class.” - David Salguero, Marketing Manager, Lucid Motors
The Lucid Air, in recent testing, managed to hit a 378km/h top speed, and also managed to hit 100km/h from rest in just 2.5-seconds. This performance will be made available only to top-spec models with the biggest battery packs, which will command an eye-watering amount of money, though the range will start with a 186kW single-motor rear-wheel drive variant with a range of about 400km, which is expected to go on sale in the US for about US$52,500 (or a whisker under $70,000).
And while Tesla will happily talk to you about the performance of the Model S, Lucid would rather you think about other things.
“Performance is just one piece of what the car is about. Speed and acceleration are byproducts of the top-spec cars’ 400-mile range.” - David Salguero, Marketing Manager, Lucid Motors
The Lucid Air will arrive in 2019, and it’ll pack batteries from Samsung and autonomous driving tech from Mobileye, which will give the Air “full Advanced Driver Assistance Systems Suite from launch,” and then transition to offering full autonomous driving capabilities in time via over-the-air software updates. The Air is “95% complete” according to Salguero, with the company’s in-construction Arizona factory scheduled to go online in 2019. It’ll initially make about 10,000 cars before ramping up production to 60,000 units annually, where further refinements can be made to push production numbers to 130,000 units annually.
And while Lucid intends to bring the Air to Europe, it isn’t one of their major priorities at the moment. “No announcements have been made,” said the marketing boss. Long term though, Lucid wants to position itself as a luxury carmaker with more models, but they’re more keen on making sure that the brand is “established and well-understood” before they look at any sort of meaningful expansion.
Stay tuned to CarShowroom as we bring you more updates as they come.
