Is this the electric car that will kill Tesla?
NEWPORT BEACH (California) — Here, in the motor court of a $55 million Newport Beach estate, climbing into the rear of the Lucid Air for test ride, we’re already sceptical.
Beneath the Jackson Pollackesque camouflage wrap, the California-based marque’s prototype has the futuristic lozenge shape we’ve seen in photos, but it almost lacks an interior entirely. There are just bare metal panels, no soundproofing, and a vinyl bench seat. None of the brand’s promised luxury selling point is present, no rear-seat screens, no deeply reclining chrome, leather, wood, and felted wool cocoons meant to give the Air the feel of a first-class jet cabin.
But we’re willing to give much of that a pass when the test driver, a World Rally Championship racer, pounds the throttle.
Yes, this rolling test-bed is stripped of much of the weight that the finished sedan will carry (this temporary body is made of easy-to produce and -replace carbon fiber panels, not aluminium and steel), but it’s also dialed down to half the 1,000 horsepower the production vehicle will sport from the 130 kWh battery pack integrated into the floor. When the driver hits the go pedal (don’t say “gas”), we are literally pinned to our seats. Moreover, with an electric motor and active air dampers at each wheel, and all that weight down in the battery lowering the centre of gravity, the car feels remarkably planted as we slalom down a steep hill that leads to the ocean. Once we turn around and take off back up the hill, we leave behind the scent of smoking rubber.
The Lucid Air may not be ready for production just yet, and given the vagaries of the electric vehicle startup business, it may never make it there. (It costs upwards of $1 billion for an established company such as General Motors to develop a new car. Imagine what it takes if you don’t yet have a factory, or workers, or a supply chain, or an existing relation with regulatory agencies, or established technology.) But it has our attention.
If everything goes according to plan and the Air hits the road in 2019 as projected, Lucid claims that the $160,000 sedan will rocket like a supercar from zero to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds, achieve 400 miles of range on a single charge, and sport advanced driving assistance capabilities such as radar, lidar, and cameras that will make it ready for pure autonomous operation — wherein the driver is all but irrelevant. It’s the dream that such companies as Tesla and other startups, such as Faraday Future (whose billionaire investor Jia Yueting has also invested in Lucid), are all working toward.
We have extreme doubts about the technological, indemnification, infrastructural, regulatory, and consumer preparedness for Level 4 or Level 5 autonomy 1 in the next two (or five, or more) years. When challenged on this, Lucid’s chief technology officer, Peter Rawlinson, formerly of Tesla, backs away from his claim that full autonomy is imminent in “the near future” and adjusts to say that the brand is simply developing and implementing features that will allow it to “futureproof the car to be ready for that eventuality”.