We’re assured customer cars don’t have the same issue. In this pre-production car it’s laggy and prone to losing signal. The touchscreen the ability to swipe music and nav menus from the top curving screen ‘through’ the dashboard to the bigger touchscreen below. It’s a sunlit cockpit, the windscreen an infinity pool of glass merging into the glass roof (a more conventional screen/header-rail/roof setup will be available on lower-spec Airs).ĭisplays are split between two surfaces – a compound-curved 5K display for the instrument panel, with a touch-sensitive section, and a lower conventional tablet (which whirs into the dash on request, allowing access to a big cavity for storage behind it). Lucid has signalled its intent to build UK-ready versions but they’re unlikely to come on stream before 2023. Left-hand-drive European sales are set to begin before the end of 2022.

While Dream versions top $100k, the upcoming entry-level single-motor/473bhp Air Pure will dip under $70k with the US EV grant, and the Touring dual-motor version under $100k. Instead we’re making do with just the 920bhp… Were it the Dream Performance version, it would pack a pleasingly symmetrical 1111hp (or 1096bhp in UK figures). The car we’re driving is a pre-production model equivalent to a Lucid Air Dream Range, the spec best suited to big miles. The Air launched in the US with 520 Dream Edition models to celebrate its EPA-rated 520-mile range. The headline 520-mile range is achieved on 19-inch wheels this car’s on camera-pleasing 21s, which on EPA-headed paper equate to a 481-mile range. In a typically bold move, the company committed to developing the package and the miniaturised drivetrain at the same time, backing itself to achieve both.

Key to the Lucid Air’s space efficiency is its miniaturised drivetrain, with the motor-transmission drive units small enough to fit in a large backpack. It’s a touch longer than a Porsche Taycan but considerably roomier. The wheelbase is within a millimetre of the Tesla Model S, and overall length similar, but the Air is a narrower car. Amid the campers, trucks and ATVs we’ll meet shortly on the coast, it looks like a jet-black alien spacecraft. It turns heads even in California everyone wants to ask what it is. And an SUV-style vehicle is already in development for Lucid’s second model, under the codename Project Gravity. Why is it a saloon, not an SUV? Because part of Lucid’s USP is big space inside a small footprint – Audi A8 space inside an A6-sized car, if you like) – and packaging space into an electric SUV is easy (comparatively) it wouldn’t show off the technology to best effect. That’s been achieved by a bold engineering approach, and by Lucid committing to creating all its technology in-house: platform, motors and transmission (which in itself is a unique and innovative design), all of the battery elements bar the cells, and much more besides.

What isn’t? Let alone the concept-car looks and interior, there’s the aforementioned huge range combined with equally expansive interior space. Hold up – what’s special about the Lucid Air? But we don’t plan on taking the direct route. Some wild claims, sure, and we’re here to find out if the new Lucid Air is more than just a dream.īetween now and the boarding call for our plane home in two days’ time, we need to get this pre-production car back to its home at Lucid HQ in Newark, Silicon Valley. Yet it has the interior space of a Mercedes-Benz S-Class, it’s fully electric and, in the right spec, can travel 500 miles between charges. The Air could out-accelerate the Lamborghini and looks just as striking in its own clean, arrestingly smooth-shaped way.

Lucid car interior