I recently spent a week driving the Lucid Air sedan around Los Angeles, and I can say for certain that the car is smarter than I am. While that may be damning with faint praise, I’ve been in a lot of cars over the last decade-plus, and the Lucid is the only one that I would definitively trust with my life. It’s so smart that I might even trust it to do my taxes.
Unfortunately, the car outsmarted me on several occasions. It’s hard to keep up with new car technology, especially when my barely-digitized daily driver still uses a physical key. I drove with my friends from the airport parking garage, where I picked up the Lucid, to our hotel. A suitcase and two knapsacks had to fold into the incredibly comfortable and roomy back seat because we couldn’t find the button on the vast digital dashboard for the “frunk.”
By the time we arrived, we’d solved that conundrum, but then I couldn’t figure out how to shut down the car. The temperature was in the 90s, and I was running the AC on high. The satellite radio was loudly playing some lousy Lewis Capaldi song. We couldn’t find the radio off button, though we desperately wanted to. We couldn’t find the AC off button. Nor could we find the actual off button. The car also seemed to want to do a software update, which it said would take 40 minutes, during which time we wouldn’t be able to access the car because, it told us very forcefully, it would lock itself during the procedure.
That did seem like a solution to the problem. After we unloaded our bags, I set the software update to start; the car gave us two minutes to clear the vehicle. It was unclear if it would self-destruct if we didn’t get out of the way. Regardless, we walked away, because the car seemed to know what it was doing, like it had a greater purpose than just conveying us around. Once we got 30 feet or so away from the vehicle, it turned off on its own and went about its superior-being business.
A panicked call to a Lucid PR person revealed a “secret button” between the U and the C on the key fob (or maybe it’s the C and the I) that serves as a kind of “open sesame” G-spot for the car. When we went back to the vehicle, it opened automatically for us. It was fully updated, something it does, in my brief experience, twice every five days. Even if it had updated every five minutes, the car was in charge. It knew best. Not me.
Lucid Motors began its auto life in 2007, as the electrical battery supplier for Formula E racing. It’s headed up by Peter Rawlinson, the former chief engineer for the Tesla Model S, and that really shows in the car’s drive dynamics. The Air comes in three models: Touring, which can go zero to 60 in 3.4 seconds; Grand Touring, which can do that in three seconds flat; and the most basic model (the one I had), the Pure, which still rips hard at 4.5 seconds.
The Pure generates 430 horsepower, which is more than enough for most humans. The other models get 620 and an incredible 819 hp. The Grand Touring, which, again, I didn’t experience, is that fast, and yet it has an astonishing electric range of 516 miles on 19-inch wheels. My car had a range of 419 miles, which is still an enormous leap forward from previous generations of electric cars. And it really zipped.
The Lucid Air has three drive modes: Smooth (which is like a basic club beat), Swift and Sprint. As you can imagine, the latter two modes are faster. But Sprint contains a cheat code, like an item from the In-N-Out Burger secret menu. If you select Sprint mode from the dash, and then do some fancy foot maneuvering with the brake and accelerator, a blue bear appears in the center cockpit, and then the car goes into Launch Mode. So while the Lucid can seem like a pleasant cruise (even on the ridiculously busy streets of Los Angeles), late at night, entering a freeway, I felt like I’d suddenly been transported into Tron. The car was so fast, it frightened me.
Obviously, the non-Smooth drive modes drain the battery faster. Even so, after five days of aggressive driving all over the Southland, I barely used more than half the charge. Electric cars have come a long way since the days of the Nissan Leaf, and Tesla is no longer the end boss of the segment.
But beyond the amazing acceleration and precise handling, one experience stood out as an example of what the Lucid can do for a driver. I went to Los Feliz to see a movie at the Vista, a theater owned by Quentin Tarantino, and found a great parking spot right in front. When the movie was over, I came out to find two cars hemming the Lucid so tightly, it seemed like escape was impossible.
But the car contains a phalanx of invisible cameras and sensors, and a shipboard display so accurate that I felt fully in command of this tough situation, like I was Tony Stark and JARVIS was talking to me inside of my helmet. The car told me exactly how many inches separated me from the car in front of me and the car behind me, and at precisely what angle I would hit them if I accelerated too fast in either direction. It helps that electric cars tend to stop moving the millisecond you take your foot off the power. Regardless, I could see every radius, almost sensing them, as though I were using the Force blindfolded.
That’s probably enough nerd references for one car review, and I possibly could have gotten out of the situation using a conventional vehicle. But I never doubted for even one second that the Lucid would help me escape. It contained the best package of safety features I’d ever seen in a vehicle. I pulled out of the parking spot tighter than a dime, and a few minutes later, I was Launching myself onto the I-10 from home, feeling incredibly fly.
When I was a kid, Knight Rider, starring David Hasselhoff, was a very popular show. The Hoff was a cool private-eye dude with an even cooler TransAm named KITT, voiced by William Daniels, who ‘90s kids will remember as Mr. Feeny from Boy Meets World. KITT could do anything. The Lucid Air Pure didn’t talk to me, but it did everything else that I’d seen KITT do back in the day. In the future, it seems, we’re all going to be Knight Rider for 15 minutes.
The Air Pure starts at $69,900, the Touring at $79,900, and the luxe Grand Touring at $109,900. A second Lucid vehicle, an SUV called “Gravity,” will retail at more than $80,000 when it comes out next year. It will go zero to 60 in about 3.5 seconds, have a projected range of at least 440 miles, probably contain Launch Mode, and will almost certainly be smarter than the average human.
