Lucid Air review

By the beginning of 2023, however, Lucid had well and truly taken off in the US. Newsweek anointed the Air with a ‘World’s Greatest Powertrain’ award while at the World Car Awards the Air was voted ‘2023 World Luxury Car’ by over 100 different jurors. It also collected a gong for having the longest range of any EV ever tested by Car & Driver magazine and made a brief but noteworthy appearance in the TV drama ‘Billions.’

And now it’s coming to Europe, although not to the UK because Lucid doesn’t think our charging network is good enough and isn’t convinced there’s a big enough market for the car over here. Yet. And I’d say they be right on both counts, which is a tragedy, frankly, because having driven the Air in all three of its most popular versions on the roads of Germany and Switzerland recently, it’s clear the awards handed out in the US are richly deserved. The Air really is an extraordinary car – for a far wider variety of reasons than you might imagine.

But most of all for the way it drives, which is to say: brilliantly. And not just because it nails the things you’d expect a luxury car to nail such as ride quality and refinement (both of which are bafflingly superb) but also because it does stuff like steering, braking, body control, agility and feel freakishly well, too.

In fundamental terms the Lucid Air is just a great car to drive. Not for an EV but for any car, full stop. It’s sharp, fast (insanely so in GT Touring guise), crisp in its responses, alert, rewarding, engaging, you name it. Its torque vectoring system is so clever it manages to shrink the car and reduce its subjective weight on the move to a point where you’d swear it weighs 500, maybe 700kg less than it actually does. It also feels far smaller, physically, than it really is thanks to the way it turns in so precisely to a corner, and how it then manages its mass from the apex to the exit of that corner.

Indeed, most of the words you’d normally use to describe a new car from BMW’s M Division – or even one from Porsche – can be used with sincerity to describe how the Air goes down the road. Given that it weighs 2.3 tonnes and can accommodate five adults in genuinely luxuriant surroundings – and has two whopping great boots: one at the front, one at the back – yet occupies no more road space than a Mercedes E-Class, it’s hard to know where to draw a line beneath the superlatives. Because it is. Truly. Incredible.

And that’s before you even mention how well made it is, or how well-appointed its cabin is. Or how beautifully its aluminium body panels are pressed and then aligned with one another on the outside of the car. Or how uniquely intuitive its on-board technology is to use, of which there is probably more than you’ll find in any other car on sale right now, yet all of it is presented to you, the driver, in an entirely logical way that says; take it or leave it, that’s up to you. Or maybe leave it for the time and come back to me when you’re feeling a bit more comfortable. Rather than ‘look at how much tech I’ve got, aren’t I perplexingly impressive’ which is how it feels inside too many cars of this type from the mainstream manufacturers in 2023.

So what’s the catch? If the Lucid Air really is this tasty to drive (and it is), is this arrestingly attractive to look at in the flesh (ditto), contains this much useful and usable technology on the inside and is packaged better than just about any other five-seater car on the planet right now, what’s the elephant in the room, I hear you ask?

Saudi Arabia, is the reply, because that’s where Lucid is mostly relocating to next, in phase two of its evolution, the company already being primarily funded by Saudi money nowadays, having begun as a homegrown, home-funded US start up.

Question is, does this bother you? Or more to the point, how much does this bother you?

If the answer is not much, then fine. The Lucid Air is an amazing car that deserves your attention no matter how its provenance may have altered as the company that created it has grown. It is melon-rotatingly good in its intended purpose to be one of the world’s best luxury cars, and purely as an EV it is in a league of one. The fact that’s it’s available in three different guises, with three increasingly bonkers powertrains (the £80k Pure has a 92kWh battery with 480bhp/686lb ft, the £91k Touring also has a 92kWh battery but with 620bhp/885lb ft while the £120k Grand Touring has a 112kWh battery with 819bhp, 885lb ft, a 521 mile range and can do 0-62mph in 3.2sec) merely adds to its overall allure.

Because judged purely as a makers of cars and nothing else, Lucid would appear to have all the bases covered right now. It has shown how a small, seriously talented, well financed group of individuals can produce a car that the mainstream would take four times longer to make, and burn through 100 times more energy/thinking time/budget/bad decision making in the process. And still not come out with a car that’s anywhere near as good as this at the other end.

On the other hand, if the Saudi aspect bothers you to a point where Lucid really isn’t your cup of tea, then fair enough. But it’ll still be a tragedy because the car itself and the individuals behind it deserve to be taken very seriously indeed. Wherever and whoever they procure their finances from. What they’ve produced in such a short space of time is so ‘right’ it’s hard to get your head around, frankly. And if the Air is anything to go by, the SUV that comes next (based on the Air but called Gravity) and the smaller all-new Macan-sized car that’s planned for 2026 – which will be ‘much more affordable’ and made in far higher numbers at a brand new mega-factory in Saudi Arabia itself – will surely be odds-on to bend some rules, too.

Plus…if you hold almost any serious car company to account on the ethics and location of its financing, at some point you’ll dig up something reasonably distasteful. Including most of the bigger ones in Europe who you might believe are squeaky clean.

Either way, the Lucid Air itself is a spectacularly good car. Too good, in many ways, to merely sit in the back of and be driven around in from one place to the next, which is likely what most owners will choose to do with their cars. And that would be an even bigger tragedy; to own a Lucid Air and never find out just how sensational it is to drive. A first world problem, true, but one that’s a little bit more complex than it seems beneath the surface.