Video: 2022 Lucid Air Grand Touring Review: Sedan or Spaceship? Why Not Both?

There's the first school that says, let's just keep it a normal luxury car but put in a battery electric powertrain like the electrified Genesis G80, or there's the other school of thought that says, let's build a spaceship like Mercedes-Benz has done with the EQS. And it's got crazy styling and it's got tons of technology and you kind of need a week's worth of astronaut training in order to use one. I want something that combines those two schools of thought. I want spaceship styling and I want easy usability with real luxury features, and I really wish somebody would create a car that does both. And somebody has. This is the new 2022 Lucid Air Grand Touring. We showed you the Lucid Air about a year ago when we got a brief drive of one around the streets of Los Angeles. Well, it's been over a year and these are now in series production. And this model is a Grand Touring trim, not the Dream Edition debut trim. This one is a bit more accessible, not quite as powerful, and has a lot of technology that is still really remarkable. And I've been able to actually live with this one for a few days now instead of just driving it for a few hours. So believe me, I have some thoughts about what Lucid has created with the new Air. Talking about the spaceship elements of the new Lucid Air, while the styling is certainly one of them, it has a coefficient of drag of 0.197, making it one of the most aerodynamic cars on the planet. Now, Mercedes said that the EQS looks the way it does because of the needs of aerodynamic efficiency, but this thing is easily as aerodynamic as the Mercedes EQS and it looks 10 times better. Other spaceship elements, this windshield, it is one continuous sheet of glass from the top of the hood to behind the front passenger's heads, and inside that looks pretty extraordinary. You have this Coke bottle shape with some pretty enormous 21 inch wheels and then it culminates in this trunk. It is an actual traditional sedan, not a hatchback. This is a trunk, and between the trunk and the frunk it has a ton of cargo room inside. Mercedes EQS doesn't even have a frunk. You can't open its hood. They've put some kind of crazy HEPA air filtration system in there for some reason. So the efficiency of this thing, the packaging of this thing is easily better than just about any other electric car on the market right now. While the outside of the Lucid Air is pretty much pure spaceship the interior is actually a lot more conventional, going for that whole let's make a normal car school of thought. The materials in here are outstanding. The leather is top quality. The stitching is all straight and true. There's faux suede on the dash and the doors. You've got wood trim, you've got fabric and it all works together really quite nicely. Something that I think the Germans have kind of lost sight of is that luxury is not technology. Like the Mercedes EQS packs in so many features and so many screens and so many icons that you have to try and wade through in order to actually make things work that it's a distracting mess. This has none of that. Yep, you've got touchscreen controls as well, but they're so much simpler than in any of the other luxury flagship sedans, that this whole thing just works so much better and so much easier than just about any other luxury flagship I've driven. Now, what do I mean by simplified controls? Well check out the central touchscreen. You have five icons up top, four icons on the bottom to control all the various functions. But even those functions are simple to use, like the climate control. It's simple, it's easy. It's pretty much upfront and forward. It's not like the one in the BMW i7, where despite the fact that I've used two different vehicles now, still can't figure out how to work that thing. You've got controls for various drive modes, the steering wheel, the mirrors, it's all right here and it's all big icons and easy to use and you're not hunting for anything. The actual display that's in front of you also has touch sensitive controls on the left side for wipers, headlights, defrosters, things that you use most often. Really easy to find, really up high. On the right side you've got things like multimedia controls. You've got navigation system, which also doubles down onto the larger screen below it, but you've also got audio and you've got phone controls as well. Everything is easy to use, easy to find. It's such a breath of fresh air compared to a lot of other luxury flagships that it's just kind of amazing that this is still the first offering from this company and they've just done it all so correctly. Driving this thing is pretty much the best part about the Lucid Air. The fact that this is, again, their first car, extraordinary the way this thing behaves. You've got three drive modes. You've got smooth, you've got swift, and you've got sprint. Smooth is exactly what it says. The ride quality of this thing is astonishing, especially considering that you've got 21 inch wheels on super low profile rubber Pirelli tires. The fact that this thing soaks up bumps the way it does is really astonishing. But it's what's under the hood, well, not actually under the hood, but I guess on the front of your axles that makes this thing astonishing. This has 819 horsepower and 885 pounds-feet of torque, that's combined between the front and rear motors. It's good enough to send this Lucid Air Grand Touring from zero to 60 miles an hour in just three seconds flat. And now that is not even the most powerful or quickest version of this car. You could get the new Sapphire trim level which has three motors, over 1200 horsepower, and will actually go zero to 60 in less than two seconds, which is just nuts. You don't need all that. This frankly is more than enough for most people. But the way this thing drives, the way it handles especially, it is just remarkably good at everything that it does. It's quiet, it's quick. It feels like a smaller car when you're really getting into various twisty parts. But overall it just drives so much better, frankly, than a lot of its competitors. You have a couple of other drive modes as well. Now swift is basically your sport mode. That stiffens things up. It lowers the suspension a little bit, makes things tighter, makes things handle a little bit better, makes it a little bit more quick on the accelerator pedal as well. Now the final mode is called sprint, and when you push sprint it actually sends up a warning screen that says, are you sure you really wanna do this? Because it kind of dials down a lot of the nanny technologies like the stability control, traction control, things like that, and it enables you to really go quickly. It is more of a track mode than anything else. but it doesn't actually say track. 'Cause quite frankly, I don't think a lot of these things are gonna show up on tracks. They will show up in mountain canyons. They will show up on some of your favorite driving roads. And it will be massively entertaining when it does. Now, as good as this thing is, is it perfect? No, not quite. This swoopy roof line is really low, and these pillars are super thick. So visibility out the front three corners is a little bit impaired. Plus you have to duck every time you get in and out of the Air. And quite frankly, I hit my head on this pillar every single time I get in and out of the car. So I'm gonna probably be concussed or brain dead by the time I turn this car in again. The packaging efficiency of the Lucid Air really shows up in the interior. The battery is so low in the chassis that the handling is affected by that. The low center of gravity really does help in terms of control, feedback, and response. But that packaging efficiency also shows up in the backseat, where despite the Air being five inches shorter than a Mercedes EQS, it has more room in the back for passengers. This really is what the EQS should be in terms of that backseat room. It feels like it has S-class levels of room. Now the seat is a little low on the floor so your knees are a bit higher than you might otherwise want but there's plenty of headroom, which frankly you can't say in the EQS. One of the Air's claims to fame is that it is one of the longest range vehicles you could get in terms of electric range. This one, the Grand Touring, has an EPA rated range of 469 miles on a full charge. That is more than just about everybody else. It's more than a Tesla Model S is going to get. And that's not even the highest range version you can get. The downside of that is that it will take longer to charge the battery. It is a large battery. But this has a 900 volt electrical architecture. So if you find a 350 kilowatt charger that is working and all the stars align right and the temperature is right and the preconditioning is correct, you can actually charge this thing of 200 miles of range in about 20 minutes on the right charger. And that's pretty extraordinary as well. So you put it in sprint mode, you push the button, you get your warning, and then you have all the horsepower available. (laughing) That's just nuts. It's so fast. Is it perfect? No, not really. There are still a couple of niggling quality issues that I experienced with a thing like a door closer and a piece of loose trim. And we do hear stories about early adopter owners who've had issues with software and build quality. And the company itself has been kind of slow in ramping up its production in order to try and get a lot of those problems worked out. What can I say, building cars is hard. Well, the other issue I have with this thing is that this one specifically, the Grand Touring trim, is about $140,000. Even the least expensive one you can get, the Lucid Air Pure trim, that's still about $90,000. So these are still extremely expensive. But if you are a risky early adopter type who doesn't mind taking on that kind of a challenge and wants something that is truly different than just about everything else out there and is excellent to drive and looks dynamite and has stellar range and impressive engineering and technology, well, if they can get their act together and really get that quality nailed, Lucid could be an absolute game changer. If you'd like to learn more about the new Lucid Air you can look everything up on cars.com.