The Tesla beater
U.S. COMPANY’S BATTERY-POWERED SEDANS ARE FAST, SPACIOUS AND LUXURIOUS
For the life of me, I can’t understand why Tesla is considered the best maker of battery-powered sedans in the United States. Oh, the Supercharger network is an incredible feat of reward trouncing risk. But the cars themselves? Well, compared to the Lucid I’m driving — indeed, every Lucid I have driven — they are decidedly second rate.
Not only is the Lucid Air dramatically more powerful — the top-of-the-line Sapphire boasts 1,234 horsepower compared with the Model S Plaid’s 1,020-hp but, even in this its least expensive form — the rearwheel-drive Pure trim we just tested — the Lucid offers more spacious seating, more repeatable range, better highway comportment and, perhaps most telling of all, vastly superior interior build quality.
It’s not just that the Air uses better materials — more on that in a moment — but that the fit and finish is truly up to German luxury sedan standards. Gaps are precisely consistent, nothing looks like it’s going to fall off — like far too much Tesla trim — the buttonry, that which remains, feels robust. Vastly different in style to any other luxury sedan, the Lucid’s interior still smacks of quality, however.
The cabin is clothed in a combination of Purluxe synthetic leather, Alcantara and some sort of denim material, all, as one might suppose, made of at least partially recycled material. What switchgear there is — air conditioning controls and some steering wheel-mounted cruise control widgets — are tastefully designed and well-executed.
It’s also pretty darned roomy inside. Oh, the sloping roofline does mean rear seat passengers will not be playing centre for the Knicks, but otherwise there’s plenty of leg, shoulder and knee room in both rows of seats. The rear trunk is accommodating — there’s a total of 22.1 cubic feet available back there — including a little false floor cubby — and, of course, there being no engine, there’s a not inconsiderable 10 cubic foot frunk.
That said, the Air’s A-pillars are huge. You can easily hide a Mitsubishi Mirage or a pedestrian crossing the street in its left-side blind spot. I get that crash worthiness is an important criteria these days, but surely visibility shouldn’t take a back seat to cabin impregnability.
Dreamdrive is actually Lucid’s Adas-configuration system, but it, like the rest of the Air’s digital pathways are pretty well organized. Trip monitoring is wonderfully informative. And though normally, as frequent readers will attest, I hate digital controls when a physical switch or button is so much easier, the ease of adjusting the outside mirrors via the touchscreen is actually quite simple. Not only that, but the switchgear that is present — like the aforementioned cruise control switchgear — is most excellent.
My complaints with the Lucid’s controls are few. First, the steering wheel adjuster is, like the mirrors, a part of the touchscreen system which makes it more complicated than the little toggle normally found on the steering column. Making the matter worse is that the range of adjustment is less than what I expect from a luxury car. It was the only comfort complaint I had with the Air, but it did compromise my seating position somewhat. Also, the air conditioning controls are, to quote my dearly departed old man, all over hell’s half acre. The temperature and fan speed control switches, as I said, are well constructed and situated. But then, for some reason, Lucid puts the front windshield “Max” button over on the left side of the dashboard and complements these scattered controls with more in the touchscreen.
Nonetheless, the Lucid’s man/machine interface is, referring back to the original thesis of this test, vastly superior to Tesla’s; there’s plenty of information to be had, but it is displayed and controlled in a much more accessible manner.
A single-motor Air Pure can sprint to 100 kilometres an hour in less than five seconds. Out on the open road, it’ll pass lethargic semis with the same alacrity as a twin turbo Mercedes.
Indeed, the only reason I can think to want more Lucid is because a rearwheel-drive luxury sedan would be such an anomaly in our winter wonderland and any move up the marque’s trim ladder would get you a second electric motor and all-wheel-drive. Even without the traction limitations of winter, the Lucid’s rear traction control system has a hard time containing the permanent-magnet motor’s 430 horses, the electronic nanny kicking in even on completely, drive, perfectly manicured California tarmac. According to Car and Driver, the base AWD version of the Air scoots to 100 km/h in a second less than the RWD Pure. That’s not because of power — it only had 50 more hp — but the result of distributing all that torque to four rubber patches, not too. So yes, only one electric motor does offer some compromises, but a paucity of power isn’t one of them.
In another bid to make the Pure more price competitive — it is, at $96,800, the cheapest Lucid available — the single motor is energized by an 88-kilowatt-hour battery. That’s 4 kwh smaller than the twin-motor Lucid Air Touring I tested last time I was in California. And yet, in my 75 miles per hour test — just slightly below my normal 125 kilometres an hour rangefinder average on Ontario’s less policed 407 — it squeezed out almost exactly 500 kilometres out of a ‘tank’ full.
Two things stand about those figures. The first is that the Pure, despite its smaller battery, eked out 38 more kilometres than the bigger-batteried AWD Touring. More importantly, that works out to an average of 17.6 kwh per 100 kilometres, virtually identical to the new-for-2025 Porsche Taycan that I tested in late January. Now, to be sure, said Taycan Turbo is much more powerful than the Air and a bit quicker — more than a second to 100 kilometres an hour — but it also costs more than twice as much.
The only reason the Air is not a bestseller — and why Lucid is in some financial turmoil — is that it is a sedan in a world desiring SUVS. That puts an enormous amount of pressure of the company’s upcoming release, a sport brute named, you guessed it, Gravity. But in the meantime, the Air Pure remains the epitome of (relatively) cost-conscious EV efficiency.
DAVID BOOTH