Lucid Air: The Ultimate Electric Luxury
Lucid Air is the proposed to be the first luxurious electric Vehicle.
Lucid Motors, founded in 2007 under the name Atieva, is an electric car manufacturer and Battery supplier for Electric World Championship Formula-E.
Founded in 2007, Atieva was not working on building cars, but majorly the development of battery packs for high-performance electric vehicles.
While producing the electric powertrain, the team at Atieva put out their drive-train to test — Project Edna, A van.
The van was used as a test bed as the motors and batteries can fit in a van without any major cosmetic updates. Edna successfully cleared the racing line before the Model S.
In 2016, citing the exceptional performance of Edna, the company changed direction to produce a technologically advanced luxury electrical vehicles, giving birth to Lucid Motors.
Now led by CEO Peter Rawlinson, Lucid Motors is planning to unveil their new production-ready Lucid Air in September 2020.
Air is a luxury electric sedan, offering up to 500 EPA miles of range on a single charge and top speed of 235 mph. Well that’s around 100 mph over any other electric vehicle in the current line-up.
According to early reports, Lucid will redefine the industry standards of range and efficiency.
Why an Electric Sedan?
Peter Rawlinson, previously at Tesla, was the technical lead of Tesla Model S. When Tesla launched the Model S, they faced a lot of flak for not making the car luxurious enough. Even the potential customers refrained from buying the Model S after the interiors were revealed. It was the primary reason behind Peter and his team deciding on building a luxury electric sedan.
Most of the luxury vehicle market comprises conventional engine vehicles, most of them coming from the big three Mercedes, BMW, and Audi. Even the Model S took off for Tesla, the luxury buyers still gravitate towards the combustion engine cars, because of their luxury status and plush interiors.
With Air, Lucid plans to fill the void in the electric luxury market.
Lucid aims to change the demographics of the market with their luxurious offering, with no compromise on luxury, range and performance, as with other offerings from competitors.
Ultimate Luxury
Tesla is a great High-Tech product, but it’s not a Luxury
— Peter Rawlinson, CEO Lucid Motors
Air provides its owners with a state of art luxury offering, never seen in a production car ever before.
As the car runs on electric motors and requires no transmission tunnel and fuel tank, Lucid designers got a lot more to space to fiddle with and design a fabulous vehicle.
Top of the line model offers executive seating in the rear, with 55 degrees reclining seats and an enormous glass roof, extending from the front dash back to rear c-pillar.
Apart from all other features of the Air, the one that stands out the most is the executive style rear seat. The Jet inspired interior is one of the best interiors ever on a mid-size sedan.
The rear seats offer top of the line legroom and headroom, along with an interactive touch panel mounted on the armrest.
This is the quality of interior that every luxury car owner deserves to have in their line-up.
Let me remind you, even a Rolls-Royce, does not offer such kind of experience.
Front Dash
The new interior layout ticks off all the boxes that Tesla Model S missed and many more. Although improving on the Model S was the primary target for the team, they did not disappoint at all.
The interior has bits of wood and many soft-touch materials providing the ultimate upmarket feel to the vehicle.
While the new Tesla Models have only a gigantic screen for all the functions and controls of the vehicle, Air takes the conventional approach and employs four panels for all the tasks. Three touch screens for infotainment, navigation systems and control panel, and the final one for the drivers heads up display.
Tesla’s approach to controls is a bit weird, every time you need to perform even a simple task as simple as operating your windshield wiper or adjusting your air-conditioning vents, you need to go through a lot of menu screens.
Aerodynamic Efficiency
Last Month, Lucid revealed the wind tunnel testing figure for the cars and achieved a drag coefficient of 0.21. That is the lowest ever on a production vehicle.
It was all possible thanks to the four-time Formula-1 winning engineers working behind the scenes. Formula racing places a lot of emphasis on aerodynamic design and thus helped Lucid achieve such staggering figures.
The aerodynamics means a lot while designing an electric vehicle. If the vehicle is efficient, then the engineers can reduce the battery capacity to achieve the same range, thus reducing the weight, and further increasing the efficiency.
This is a never ending loop.
Autonomous Capabilities
Even as Elon Musk repeatedly claims that Cameras are good enough to perform the monitoring tasks, the industry seems to disagree.
Even Lucid is planning to go ahead with LiDAR sensors to develop their Lucid Dream Drive driver-assist package. The cars would come ready with driver monitoring systems, surround cameras, and sensors. This would allow Level 3 autonomous driving.
The Driver monitoring package is the main talking point. With eye trackers in place, Air can sense whether the driver is aware of the surroundings or not. If the car senses that the driver is unaware of the surroundings, the car will slow down and park on the roadside.
Competition
“Please do not term as Tesla Killers, the market is enormous enough that we can co-exist and thrive in this world,” says Peter in an interview with Ars.
Rawlinson has a pretty much strategic approach to the market. He aims to bring better and sustainable vehicles to the market and wants to switch the world to electric as soon as possible.
With this approach, Lucid’s biggest foes are the internal combustion engine cars. If possible at all, the transition to electricity would only be possible with co-operation and outsourcing technology.
The Future
The Company has received a strong round of funding from the Saudi Public fund and has strong backing from its early investors. With, the current investments Lucid is getting its Arizona factory ready to produce the production models of the Air.
The Lucid Motors executives plan on building better cars for the future, using their advanced technology and mass production capabilities. The technology used in the top end cars will make their way to down-market cars that will be much more affordable.
As of now, we have no confirmation if Lucid would manufacture these large volume cars or outsource the powertrain to other OEM’s. Anyways, it is a win-win situation for both the consumers and Lucid Motors.
As Peter claims that the OEM’s are lazy enough to adapt to the electric vehicles, he thinks the upcoming startups would not leave any chance with the OEM’s to thrive in the future.
Let’s hope Lucid does well in the market paves the way for better electric future.
This would bring hope to all the new and upcoming startup ventures to bring in new tech and innovation to the industry. 
