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Transportation Power

Lucid Air Electric Sedan Zips By Tesla With EPA-Rated 520-Mile Range (cnet.com) 163

Posted by BeauHD from the range-wars dept.
The EPA says the Lucid Air electric sedan will do 520 miles on a full charge, which is well over 100 miles more than the Tesla Model S Long Range, which delivers an estimated 405 miles. CNET reports: The 520-mile range estimate is specific to the Air Dream Edition Range with 19-inch wheels. Buyers should know the optional 21-inch wheels drop the range to an estimated 481 miles. Still, that's damned impressive. For those who select the Air Dream Edition Performance, they won't be penalized too much with a lower range. The car still comes in at an EPA-estimated 471 miles with 19-inch wheels and 451 miles with 21-inch wheels. The trade-off is there's 1,111 horsepower on tap with the Performance, compared to only 933 hp for the Range model.

The Dream Edition cars are two limited-edition choices Lucid sold out of a while ago, but don't fret, there are other options. For now, the EPA also got its hands on the Air Grand Touring trim, which returns 516 miles of range after the feds' tests. Even if you missed out on the Dream Edition Range, losing just four miles isn't the worst thing in the world. Opt for the larger 21-inch wheels on this model and the range figure drops to 469 miles. This particular configuration also provides a no-less-substantial 800 hp. If you ask me, there's nothing anyone's compromising on here. Production of the first customer cars is meant to start later this year, with prices for the Dream Editions starting at $169,000.
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Lucid Air Electric Sedan Zips By Tesla With EPA-Rated 520-Mile Range More

Lucid Air Electric Sedan Zips By Tesla With EPA-Rated 520-Mile Range

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  • Oh sure I want a couple (Score:3)

    by marcle ( 1575627 ) on Thursday September 16, 2021 @07:50PM (#61803131)

    I'll just root around in my couch cushions for a little change...

  • Good for Tesla (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ghoul ( 157158 ) on Thursday September 16, 2021 @07:57PM (#61803141)
    Lucid shows how much value for money Tesla Model 3. Here in the Valley immigrant families who used to go for Toyotas are going Model 3s.. When the immigrant engineers buy it you know its a good deal.
    • What do immigrants have to do with cars? lmao.

  • Holy diminishing returns batman (Score:5, Informative)

    by niftydude ( 1745144 ) on Thursday September 16, 2021 @08:00PM (#61803145)
    So for approx 50% extra cost compared to a Tesla S "long range" you get a 25% increase in range?

    Lucid Air aren't exactly providing the sort of competitive mass-market accessible EV that people who claim to care about the environment would be expected to propose.

    • Re:Holy diminishing returns batman (Score:4, Insightful)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Thursday September 16, 2021 @08:48PM (#61803217)

      So for approx 50% extra cost compared to a Tesla S "long range" you get a 25% increase in range?

      It's perfectly fine to think that way, as long as you apply the same logic consistently when you're comparing less expensive brands (like the Chevy Bolt) with Tesla.

    • Re:Holy diminishing returns batman (Score:4, Insightful)

      by mattventura ( 1408229 ) on Thursday September 16, 2021 @08:54PM (#61803227) Homepage
      I don't think that's really a good way to look at it. If you pay 50% more for a gas car, you don't expect 50% more range. At some point, it's "enough" range, and the value comes from other aspects. After all, by that same logic, there's no reason to buy a model S, because it's only 15% more range than the model 3, despite costing 80% more.

      • Enough is 400 miles in my opinion. I have not yet bought a tesla because I regularly drive 400 miles round trip and would hate to be stuck charging somewhere on the drive. This trip is to visit family and I'd never hear the end of it if I asked everyone to move so I could pull up close enough to plug my car into my father's garage.

        The other reason is finish. The Model 3 has a shit finish compared to cars in the same price bracket. It looks like I'm buying a 20k car when I'm paying the 50k price.

    • They're also just getting started. Hopefully, they can reduce the costs over time if they can get enough sales of these to keep afloat.

      Tesla was similarly slammed for the prices of its early cars, but that provided the money to develop the less expensive (but still expensive) Model X and the much more affordable Model 3, and has plans for a $25,000 car (not including rebates or other government incentives) in the next couple of years. I'm not sold on the idea of a structural battery pack, but maybe it all w

    • It's even worse in Europe, seeing as we have pretty hefty taxes on car sales, plus a 10% import tarif on cars from the US. Tesla's Model 3 sells for EUR. 49,980 (US$ 58,000) here in The Netherlands, and that's for the Standard Range Plus, without auto pilot.

    • Lucid aren't aiming for mass market, this edition is to compete with Mercedes S Class type cars, Tesla doesn't sell cars at this level of luxury.

    • So for approx 50% extra cost compared to a Tesla S "long range" you get a 25% increase in range?

      Think about it as paying a bit extra to not have a stupid yoke or an auto pilot that's going to kill you.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's like an expensive watch. It costs 1000x what a cheap watch costs, but doesn't offer 1000x the performance.

    • More than that, if the average trip you take is less than 100 miles, you're paying for a whole lot of range you never use. I'm very happy with 300 miles of range because that's way more than I usually drive and I just plug into the 240V/48A charger on my wall at home. We drove it across the country in the last calendar year and an entire day's worth of driving is only extended by about an hour of charging time if you do it right. (don't charge to full if there's another charger you can reach - the top 20%

    • So for approx 50% extra cost compared to a Tesla S "long range" you get a 25% increase in range?

      Lucid Air aren't exactly providing the sort of competitive mass-market accessible EV that people who claim to care about the environment would be expected to propose.

      You're going to need that extra 25% of range if you're driving around in a car that doesn't come with a supercharger network.

  • Shows how good the basic battery electric platform is. Lucid is achieving better than 250 Wh/ mile efficiency. Comparable to the 3 and the Y in consumption, but on a 1000 HP package.

    Why the legacy ICEV makers with decades of experience are not coming up with similar cars? Are they pulling their punches not to hurt their ICEV market share? Or they apply lessons from ICEV in a dumb way? BMW i3 went for light advanced carbon fibre panels, reducing weight to achieve efficiency. But that is true for ICEV, for

    • I would be interested to know how much of that 1000 HP is used when doing the testing for the EPA mileage rating. Just like any vehicle, if you drive it like a racecar, the fuel consumption is going to be much higher than if you drive it like a grandma (I call my driving hypermileing, sounds more macho).

      • > I would be interested to know how much of that 1000 HP is used when doing the testing for the EPA mileage rating

        The answer is "as much as necessary"

        The EPA's testing procedures are public information. Just because you have a 1000HP car doesn't mean they do anything differently than with a 150HP car. They're testing efficiency, not performance, and the testing cycle attempts to approximate typical driving conditions not a day at the track.

        Side rant: "Wh/mi" (or km) is the worst fucking thing. It's like

        • Rant is well justified.

          Metric measuring efficiency should be co-variant with efficiency. Higher efficiency should have a higher number. Wh/mile is consumption and it is contra-variant with efficiency.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jbengt ( 874751 )

            Metric measuring efficiency should be co-variant with efficiency.

            But miles per gallon is not called efficiency, it's called fuel economy. So it should instead be fuel used per distance traveled, like gallons per 1,000 miles. That gives a more easily understood idea of how much it costs to operate the vehicle.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jbengt ( 874751 )

          Use mi/kWh; it's directly analogous to gal/mi

          Do you mean it's inversely analogous to gal/mi? or directly analogous to mi/gal?.

          I do think fuel economy makes more sense in gallons per 1000 miles (or kWh / 1000 miles) than miles per gallon. People get the wrong impression about comparisons in mpg. They think going from 20 to 30 mpg saves less money than going from 30 to 45 mpg, when it's the other way around. (They're the same percentage change, but different numerical change in fuel cost.) 1,000 miles

          • My apologies; In my seething rage I made two errors in that rant:

            1) "Nobody does that because it's intuitive and not helpful" should of course be "unintuitive"

            2) " it's directly analogous to gal/mi " should, as you rightly point out, be "mi/gal"

            > gallons per 1,000 mile makes it fairly easy to see potential savings in fuel costs

            I have never met anyone who uses that kind of math. Maybe it's a European thing. Everyone here in the US talks, thinks and works with MPG when discussing or comparing vehicle effic

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      "Why the legacy ICEV makers with decades of experience are not coming up with similar cars?"

      If you think this is true, you are paying no attention. MB is introducing an extremely competitive car to the Lucid Air.

      "Are they pulling their punches not to hurt their ICEV market share? Or they apply lessons from ICEV in a dumb way? BMW i3 went for light advanced carbon fibre panels, reducing weight to achieve efficiency. But that is true for ICEV, for BEV weight matters much less. Things like that are tripping t

    • Shows how good the basic battery electric platform is. Lucid is achieving better than 250 Wh/ mile efficiency. Comparable to the 3 and the Y in consumption, but on a 1000 HP package.

      The peak HP output will have very little to do with range. I've dealt with electric motors before, as a shit shoveler and grain mill operator on a farm and as an electrical engineering student working on a solar car, which means I can say with confidence that the maximum output of the motor has little to do with its efficiency. There will be extremes where this matters since the mass of the motor will mean more mass in the car, and the mass of the rotor means more power needed to get it to spin. Tesla ap

  • I can buy a Tesla today for $40-$80K (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mschuyler ( 197441 ) on Thursday September 16, 2021 @08:09PM (#61803153) Homepage Journal

    I do think the Lucid Air at a 500 mile range is a very nice car for $170K? So where can I buy one today? Let's be sure and compare apples and oranges here. The Model S long range is about $90K, so I need to pay double for an extra 100 miles of range for the 500 mile range Lucid Air. The cheaper $60K Lucid Air will have a 240 mile range and, of course, it's still vapor ware. I am rooting for ALL Ev's, including Tesla, Lucid, VW, and even the Ford Lightning, but let's not believe the hyperbolic comparisons here. Until Lucid is available for sale, it's not real.

    • You can get more range at the trade of battery life.

      So depth of charge/discharge and battery kWh needs to be disclosed to make car range comparisons.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jaa101 ( 627731 )

        The Lucid Air battery is warranted to retain at least 70% of its original capacity for a least 8 years or 100,000 miles, whichever comes first. That's the same as the Tesla Model 3, though other Teslas go up to as much as 150,000 miles. So the Lucid Air can't be cheating too badly with discharge depth or, if they are, they're going to be hammered with battery replacements under warranty.

    • Re:I can buy a Tesla today for $40-$80K (Score:5, Informative)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Thursday September 16, 2021 @08:45PM (#61803211)

      Car And Driver managed to take it for a spin https://www.motortrend.com/rev... [motortrend.com]

      • Hope they continue to praise the car even if Lucid decides to sell direct to customer, and use a very small advertising budget.

        Many mags that praised Tesla early have turned hostile.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by boley1 ( 2001576 )

        I get your point, but literally speaking, probably not. Unless you get lucky and find one used or in local inventory because a delivery fell through. They are pretty much sold out until next year on most popular models and availability is several months out on even the remaining less popular and expensive trims.

    • Lucid Air Dream Edition != Tesla Model S long range. they are in different luxury segments so not even worth a comparison. " Until Lucid is available for sale, it's not real." - yawn, this type of comment is so tired and only applicable companies like Nikola (prior to be bought)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      For 99% of people it's not worth getting a super long range car.

      You can get a 280-300 mile range car for around â40k, less whatever tax breaks/subsidies are available to you. At that point prices start to rise quite sharply and you end up paying tens of thousands for something you will very rarely use, and which ends up saving you only minutes a year.

      In fact for most people a much cheaper 200 mile range car makes the most sense. 200 miles fits nicely with when you want to take a break to stretch your l

  • Now if they would sell a BEV with a 500 mile range for $30K, or better yet $20K, then everyone would buy them. But I guess they have to keep the price up so the power grid doesn't die from mass adoption. And the fuel tax doesn't dry up before they figure out a way to replace it.

    • What is keeping BEV prices high is the cost of the batteries. There is a limited supply of batteries made and the price of the batteries will reflect on this limited supply. Then is the issue of a limited supply of raw material to make the batteries. Even if Tesla and its competition build more factories to make batteries they are then competing for a limited supply of lithium, cobalt, or whatever. I recall that there's silicon in some of these batteries and there's a limited supply of that. There's no

    • "But I guess they have to keep the price up so the power grid doesn't die from mass adoption."

      Yes, because the last thing electric companies want is to sell more electricity and the same thing for car companies. Oh no, demand for the products we're selling is up, how will we ever be able to recover! Sadly everyone who knew how to install wires, build power plants, and cars got amnesia.

      "And the fuel tax doesn't dry up before they figure out a way to replace it."

      Yes, that's how things work. Capitalists trying

    • Yeah, because a car manufacturing company is going to hamstring themselves to bail out another company's recalcitrance to expand their capacities in a completely different business sector voluntarily by shrinking their market through high pricing.

      I don't think that was a regular brownie you ate a couple hours ago.

  • Lucid Motors needs to prove that they are not a stock scam.

  • Lucid went public as a SPAC recently, which is a concern regarding any press. Especially all the press regarding how many have been sold. In fact there is literally nobody who actually owns a lucid air and is driving it around as their personal vehicle.

    Without any real sort of production beyond a few prototypes, itâ(TM)s anyoneâ(TM)s guess as to whether or not they will succeed.

    TSLA had built and sold a certifiable 1000 vehicles before it went public. This is not to glorify Tesla, but really to un

    • Considering Lucid have a factory producing pre-production vehicles and sent letters to order holders to confirm up their specification so they can build them, they are nothing like Tesla in 2007.
      Nikola was a vaporware company, Lucid is not.

      • wait...are you saying Lucid Air has actually delivered vehicles to customers and they are driving them around?

        or does "having a factory" (which Tesla did in 2007, although their "factory" was looser in definition) and "sending letters to order holders" (which Tesla did in 2007) constitutes some lower risk for Lucid Air investors now than Tesla investors 14 years ago?

  • "The trade-off is there's 1,111 horsepower on tap with the Performance, compared to only 933 hp for the Range model."

    Saying "only 933 hp" is like saying it's only hailing the size of "small" grapefruits.

  • Important news: more angels can now dance on the head of a pin.

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