Coming up...Lucid Air Review!
 

Finally got to test drive a Lucid Air. The Lucid I test drove was the Air AWD, 480 hp, with a 410 mile range, MSRP $82,400. Let me first start out with what I didn't like:

Price
Way, way too many screens for my taste
Mapping took more than 15 seconds "thinking" after destination was entered
Bumped my head getting into the backseat (and I'm not very tall)
Clam trunk is really weird
Weird sound coming from motors at low speeds (more on that later)

What I liked about it:

roomy and comfortable front and rear seats
Excellent build quality both inside and outside
Stalks for gears and signal
Easy to drive
Nice ride, well set up suspension (strut based)
Different drive modes
Excellent performance and handling, plenty of power and torque when you need it
Competent breaking
Very well dampened and plenty of road and noise isolation

They were located in one of the major malls in San Jose, so I had to park in the parking garage and make my way to the Lucid space, which is located near the Polestar space. A bit of a walk as I had to go through the mall, which is fine (I need the exercise anyway). I was greeted by the Lucid Air Pure, which was in the front of the space:

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After a few minutes I was met by my Lucid rep, we chatted a bit and he had me sign a docusign, and we were off to the basement parking structure where he introduced me to the car I was taking out for the test drive:

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It uses the 3D image view, so getting out of tight spaces is easy. After getting out of the parking structure, we headed for the nearby 280 freeway. I was very comfortable in the drivers seat, and car felt really solid. Like most electric cars, it has smooth, instant torque, and is very quiet. Except at low speeds it has this hum sound from the motors. At first I thought it was artificial, but the rep told me that was the sound the motors make a low speeds. I wouldn't call it annoying, I just noticed it and it's not a big deal. Once we got up to speed, the sound for the motors got quieter.

At freeway speeds the Air was responsive, quiet and well balanced. At 80 MPH it felt like we were doing 60. I was able to zip through and make some quick lane changes. Altogether I drove it probably 20 minutes, which was enough to get a feel for the car.

I asked him about the mapping and trip planning, and when he started to show me how the maps work, there was a long delay before it finally brought up the map. Maybe it was compiling traffic data, I don't know but it took at least 15 seconds to map the destination.

Final thoughts:

The Lucid seems to be a well thought out and well built car. You can see Lucid is trying to be a well refined Model S with no weaknesses, polished curves with lots of bell and whistles. It is very comfortable and refined, but it has way too much going in in the display area for my liking. Also it's just way to pricey, and my fear is if something goes wrong, you will be without your car for awhile due to lack of service centers.

One thing I want to mention that it does better than Tesla: Fast charging (supports 350 kW, 17 minutes gives you 200 miles range). I wish Tesla would push the envelope more on this front, but probably due to the number and robustness of their charging infrastructure, they haven't felt that this is a priority

Vibe I get is nice car but not something you'd actually buy. Yes? Seems to be a common sentiment. On the screen real estate are auto makers filling up the dash just to say look at us we are not Tesla? MOAR screens. Did you monkey around with the lower screen retract feature? Charging speed is something Tesla has been bested on but I bet it's because other auto makers are not too concerned about battery life. I really hate the clam shell trunk what a bizarre design choice.

Maybe the Lucid Gravity (SUV) will save the company because this car is not going to.

It's definitely a nice car, well thought out, checks a lot of boxes, but yes, I wouldn't buy it. Tesla (and Polestar to an extent) have me loving simplicity.

No, I didn't play around with the screens, I mostly wanted to know how it drives. The trunk is for sure a weird choice I'm still trying figure out. I tried to get the sales guy to explain it :dunno:

I think you hit the hammer on the head. At this price, you would only lease an Air. So why would they be concerned about battery life. Tesla on the other hand, you can see they how badly they want the battery pack to last 300K plus.

Not a bad car. It has potential. There are people who just don't want a Tesla for whatever reason. Lucid might appeal to this particular set of buyers

Appreciate the write up! Isn't the slow infotainment one of the biggest gripes about the interior? Also, does the P2 not have the hum? The motors on the Rivian have a louder hum/whir than both my old 3P and my wife's 3LR.

I didn't play around with the infotainment screen. It seemed fine, the only issue was when we used the maps feature, it took awhile to calculate the destination, which was down the street LoL!

The P2 motors are pretty quiet. They used to have a slight harmonic type of sound when cruising, but there was an update that fixed that, so now they are pretty quiet, maybe a slight whir, like a fan. The Y's front motor makes a slight hum sound when you go hard, but it goes away quickly

Lucid was supposedly fixing the infotainment lag with a software update? I can't imagine the issue is due to a lack of processing power. It was supposed to have been fixed by now.

edit - unless @AMIRZA786 you were still in or just getting out of the parking structure when you set the destination in which case it might just have been a delay locking on to the GPS signal(s).

I'm guessing Lucid cobbled together their software using existing libraries that's why it's so slow. I've coded very complex software in Visual Basic using snippets from all over the place it becomes a bloated mess after a while. Some portions I ended up doing myself (like calendar/date functions).

No, we were on the road, near Steven Creek Blvd