I Bought A Lucid Air - The Engineer's Dream Car!

If you say you care about efficiency, okay, yeah, sure, whatever. But then you're like, no, I really care about efficiency. Okay, well, you're a nerd. But then you go on to say, no, Jason, I don't think you get it. I really, really, really care about efficiency. Efficiency is everything. The rest of life is meaningless. Well, now I know you work for Lucid. Hello, everyone, and welcome in this video sponsored by Xpel. We'll get into that later. I have bought a 2025 Lucid Air Touring, and I'm really excited about this because genuinely, this vehicle is one of the most impressive feats of engineering in the automotive world, whether combustion or electric. And I'm not sure if you're aware, but I kind of think engineering is rad. Now, something most people don't go around saying at parties because it's a conversation stopper is that efficiency is cool. But I want to take a moment to explain why efficiency is cool, because what it enables is rather remarkable. Here's a little teaser. If you have a gas car, and you ask from an efficiency standpoint, where do you think most of the energy is lost to make the car move? The answer is very easy. The engine. A combustion engine wastes about two-thirds of the energy going in as heat, whether through the cooling system or out the exhaust. Relatable. But what about this car? Where do you think most of the energy is lost to make this car move? You might think, like a combustion vehicle, it's the powertrain losses. Nope. You might very reasonably think it's aerodynamic losses, pushing air out of the way as the car moves. But at average driving speeds, nope, it's not that either. It's the tires. What? Yeah, so this vehicle is so efficient that most of the energy lost in many driving scenarios is actually just heating up the tires, rolling resistance as it moves along. Now, simply switching from gas to electric does yield massive efficiency improvements. But if you care to the nth degree, you end up with something like this. And the proof is in the testing. If you go to fueleconomy.gov, the highest combined EPA-rated vehicle by a large margin is the 2025 Lucid Air Pure rear-wheel drive. And the fifth most economic vehicle is the one in front of me, the 2025 Lucid Air Touring all-wheel drive with 19-inch wheels. And typically when you think economic, you think, okay, the car is small, cramped, not very powerful, and unpractical. Yet this is incredibly spacious, has 620 horsepower, and 885 pound-feet of torque. And it is good for a true 0-60, no rollout nonsense, of just 3.4 seconds. In fact, caranddriver tested it at quicker than that, at 3.2 seconds. Again, with no rollout. It's fast, it's spacious, it's quiet, it's comfortable, it's genuinely one of the most impressive vehicles I've ever driven. Which is why I bought one. But just so that you're well aware, I paid for this. Lucid didn't know I was getting it, the whole buying process happened in a single day, so I don't think there's any way they could have known, and I paid what anyone else would have paid. We'll get into the finances later. But in this video, I want to quickly touch on many of the unique and brilliant engineering feats achieved by this car, so that you can get a taste for just how laser-focused the process was in creating such a machine. Though I can tell you one thing they were not focused on, and that is the color. They call this color, new for 2025, Fathom Blue Metallic. I assume they call it this because it's hard to fathom that there's any blue in it whatsoever. It's gray. And before you comment, Jason, it's very clearly blue. Yeah, okay, sure. Perhaps you can tell in the very bright, very blue lighting of my garage, that the car is the most effortless shade of blue that you've ever seen. But if you put it out in the warm sunlight on an otherwise good-looking car, it's just another boring shade of gray. And I'm sure there's a team of designers out there that believe it to be classy and sophisticated. A distinct, impeccably pedigreed exterior, meticulously crafted for those with refined taste. It's boring! The f*** am I saying? And look, I realize the joke falls a bit short because not only are my wine glasses stemless, but they are plastic. As classless as I am. Now, before we dive into the many fascinating, unique engineering elements of this car, I may not totally love the color. But I do love today's sponsor, XPEL, for keeping this paint scratch-free. The good folks at Elite Window Tint have completely covered this car with XPEL's self-healing Ultimate Plus Paint Protective Film. The windows are looking excellent with XPEL XR Plus Tint, which I think goes really well with the stealth package on this Lucid, providing a lot of contrast with all the dark elements versus the lighter, allegedly blue, paint. All of that is covered in their Fusion Plus Ceramic Coating, giving the exterior a very glossy pop and making it super easy to clean. And just as testament to XPEL's quality, I had their Paint Protective Film on my Model 3 for nearly seven years before selling it, and it held up incredibly well, keeping the car's exterior scratch-free. All right, so remember, the theme with this car is efficiency. A lot of people don't realize that they should care about efficiency. So I'm going to be describing many of the features here, and I think it will lead to this aha moment where you realize that all of this effort really does make sense for the consumer. Starting with the battery, because that's really where the story starts. Before becoming Lucid, Lucid was Ativa, a battery and powertrain technology company. In fact, Lucid was the supplier for Formula E battery packs for four seasons. So it's kind of funny to think that you have all of these various car manufacturers in Formula E, and yet at the time, they're all using battery packs developed by Lucid. We're developing tech to bring from the racetrack to the road. Um, is it you? So technically, they understand batteries very well, but there's another important part of the story, and that's Peter Rawlinson, who was the chief engineer of the original Tesla Model S, who joined Tesla after being a chief engineer for Lotus. Now, Rawlinson had a lot of freedom at Tesla, but he wasn't in complete control, right? His decision still had to be approved by the higher-ups. Well, he left and eventually found himself as CTO at Lucid, and then CEO, where he did have complete control over the project. And he said one of the things he wanted to do with the Model S was sculpt the battery pack in a unique way, but he wasn't allowed to. Well, this is his baby. He has final say over all the decisions. So the battery pack design stands out here for numerous reasons, but two big ones include that there is a ton of space in the rear seats for passengers' foot room, something much less ample in the Tesla Model S, and the back of the battery pack actually lifts slightly, allowing for a longer diffuser under the car, improving aerodynamics. So you have more passenger space and you have a more efficient vehicle. All right, so following the energy flow after the battery, the electric juice goes to the inverter. Lucid has a very compact inverter with silicon carbide switches, and I'll be honest, despite in principle inverters being a fairly simple idea, turning direct current from the battery into an alternating current for the electric motors, I still think of them as magic. Lucid has a 30-minute video diving into their inverter that's fascinating if you care to have a watch. I'll have all the links in the video description, but it's very efficient, as are the electric motors that the inverter sends power to. Then there's the electric motor, with too much innovation to cover in a single video. But two really cool things stand out to me. First, instead of the more conventional round wire style, where you have these round wires filling up the slots within the stator, they use a hairpin style. So you have these rectangles, which gives you a much better slot fill and better consistency across the entire motor. Now, plenty of companies have switched over to a hairpin style, but this requires a very complicated manufacturing process, with a ton of individual welds connecting all these hairpin ends together. So what Lucid did, instead of having all of these hairpin windings that you had to weld together, they developed a continuous wave winding, eliminating those weld points, so it had much better consistency throughout the entire winding. And second, their cooling solution is also genius. So traditional motors use coolant channels that are on the outside, or close to the outside of the stator. But as you can see, they're far away from the copper windings. Lucid pulled these coolant channels really close to the copper windings, and they're located within a magnetic dead zone, so they don't disrupt the effectiveness of these windings. So of course, this allows you to cool the windings much more effectively, giving you better efficiency. But it also means that on startup, this oil heats up quicker, because it's closer to the windings. This gives you better efficiency on startup, because you get things up to operating temperature more quickly. Again, the motor is brilliant. And again, they have over an hour-long tech talk on it, which is fascinating. There might even be a whiteboard involved. Truly my people. Now from the motor, we send that power to the differential, right? Well in this case, you're not traveling very far, as the tiny differential is packaged inside the rotor. So the innermost portion of the rotor is usually wasted space, right? Because if you're gonna create a torque, you need to create that force at a distance from the rotational axis. So since the middle of the rotor isn't going to be used to generate torque, well, what can you put in that space? How about a tiny little adorable differential? Naturally, you might wonder, how can this tiny little differential handle so much torque? Two key points. First, they're using four pinions instead of two spider gears, like you'd see on most differentials. More parts, more surface area, this spreads out the forces. But second, and critically, this differential is before the gear reduction. So it's only seeing motor torque, not the seven times multiplier from the final drive ratio that's going to the wheels. And all of this, the motor, the inverter, the differential, and the final 701 gear reduction, this is all housed in a single package. And it is remarkably small and industry leading, not only in terms of power density from a weight standpoint, but also, just as importantly, from a volumetric standpoint. Okay, from the final drive, we have our drive shafts that go out to the wheels. I, because I do not believe in throwing all of Lucid's effort into the toilet, have gone with their smallest wheel option, the 19 inch. They also offer 20 and 21 inches. And look, looks are subjective. It's why someone agreed to marry me. But what an absolute travesty to decide to choose the larger wheels on this vehicle, despite if, maybe to you, it looks better. Bigger wheels have a huge impact on range, which drops nearly 30 miles if you go to 20 inches and 45 miles if you go to 21 inches. Not to mention, you now have significantly increased your unsprung rotational mass. So not only is your ride quality going to get worse, but your car will be slower too. And you're more likely to get a flat tire from a pothole. Are you happy? Are you happy with your 21 inch wheels? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's your decision. You should be free to make the wrong one. And if you bump up in wheel size, well, you're no longer on a square tire setup. The rear tires are then wider than the front. So rotating tires, keeping a everything gets more complicated. Now I did say don't get the big wheels and throw all of Lucy's work in the toilet. And then I took off the eco tires and put on high performance tires, which yeah, will certainly impact the rolling resistance and thus the range. But at least performance tires offer a tangible benefit in terms of steering feel, response, overall grip. Shout out Continental. Thanks for the hookup. So we've kind of worked our way from the inside out, and we've really only scratched the surface in terms of all the effort going into efficiency. One example, this body shape from a drag coefficient standpoint at just 0.197. This is the most aerodynamic production car. They also use coil springs instead of air springs because the benefit of air springs is varying ride height, but it's already fairly low. So lowering further on the highway yields minimal benefit. And you of course have to power the air compressor and air springs actually have greater heat loss than coil springs. Now, of course, you see the opposite strategy on Lucid's SUV, the gravity, because if you want to go off road in an SUV, well, you need to raise it up. So you have plenty of ground clearance, but then when you're driving on the highway, you want to down. So in that case, the efficiency is paid off for allowing the vehicle to get lower while driving on the highway. And the efficiency means this car can travel a genuine 400 miles on a single charge, despite only having a 92 kilowatt hour battery pack. And I say genuine because when I picked up the car, I immediately drove it 163 miles on the highway. Most of that at 70 to 80 miles per hour, and it only used 41% of the battery. That gives an indicated range of 398 miles. And that was without the wheel arrow caps on, so it can do even better. Incredible. Oh dear. Name an electric car sold in the United States with less than 100 kilowatt hour battery pack and 400 miles of real world range. That's it. That's the only one. And their quest for efficiency doesn't simply end with getting you a lot of range from, relatively speaking, not that much battery. It's also about packaging efficiency, like their innovative micro lens array lights. Really compact, excellent lighting, and control of where that light goes. Through their combined effort, Lucid saved so much space up front that this frunk is over five times larger than that of the Cadillac Celestic. And the Celestic has the largest hood ever used on a GM product. Well, see you later. It's actually still kind of spacious in here. So you say, Jason, why should I care about efficiency? Again, it's not about making great conversation at parties, but rather if everything is efficient, the battery can be smaller. Things that are efficient get smaller in size. And so you, the customer, get to take advantage of that leftover space, if the engineers at the company are willing to put in the effort to let you make use of it. Also not worth mentioning at parties that your physical features are smaller because you're more efficient. But if packaging efficiency was considered a luxury, which it is obviously not, just look at any of the German competitors, then this would be considered the ultimate luxury car. I have a whole video on this worth checking out, but let's just briefly hit some highlights. The Cadillac Celestic is taller, it's almost half a foot wider, and it's over 21 inches longer. It is so, so much bigger. And yet, they have nearly identical combined legroom and nearly identical combined cargo space. And the Cadillac's a hatchback. How about the Mercedes EQS? It's a way longer vehicle with a way longer wheelbase, yet less legroom and way less cargo space. Tesla Model S, exact same wheelbase as the Lucid, yet five fewer inches of legroom and less cargo space, despite it being a hatchback. Hey, how about the Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo? Another hatchback, nearly the same exterior dimensions as the Lucid, yet the Porsche has snug rear seats, and the Lucid has over 70% more cargo space as a sedan. So all of this effort results in a car that has incredible range and is incredibly spacious inside. It is exceptionally quiet, and the ride quality is among the very best of any vehicle I've ever driven, which I'm fortunate to say is a very long list. And all of this honestly comes at a remarkable price when you consider how it fares against the competition. I was mostly cross-shopping this with the Porsche Taycan, which you can get really good prices on used, and the new Hyundai Ioniq 6N. I love the Taycan. It's a great car, but it's not nearly as spacious as the Lucid, despite being nearly the exact same size. And that's especially true for the rear seats. I'm also not a fan of the brake pedal feel in the Taycan, and they don't offer one pedal driving. The Ioniq 6N is a blast, and I was down to wait for it. But the cargo space is so minimal. The Lucid has nearly three times the cargo space, and I frequently take trips with my cars and stuff them full. Now a quick comment on price. I decided to lease this car three years, 12,000 miles a year, nothing down. I've never leased a car before, because generally speaking it doesn't make financial sense. Best thing you can do is buy used. Second best thing typically is buy new, and this does have some improvements over the previous year Lucids. It now has a heat pump, which I'll make great use of improving cold weather range, and it has a faster operating computer. But to my surprise, the lease is genuinely the cheapest option, rather than buying. Buying it outright, the total price before taxes is $78,450, for a car that stickers for $84,450, based on my build. But leased, I'm paying about $32,000 for three years, with a buyout price after the lease of about $39,000, so about $72,000 total. Which, as you'll notice, is less than just buying the car outright. Now that doesn't really make any sense to me, though I don't really care. I was just gonna do whatever made more financial sense. And I'm sure many will bring up Lucid's financial situation isn't that great. They're about as in the green as this car is blue. That is to say, not at all. But that's really a matter of volume. I do think if they had bigger order numbers, their situation could change. Maybe gravity, and hopefully their midsize platform, can change that for them. Regardless, leasing this is an incredible deal. At the time I put in for my lease, it was about half the total cost of the same sticker price Tesla Model S. That's wild. And it was less than half the cost of a Porsche Taycan lease. In fact, my monthly payments, with zero down, are less than if I were to lease a Tesla Model 3 Performance. That's nuts. Anyways, if you're interested, I'll share my referral code, which can offer a discount. But buy whatever you want. Don't take this as me trying to persuade you one way or the other. Personally, I think this is an extraordinary car. And I really don't think it's that difficult for a consumer to see, even though all of the engineering behind it is very complicated. It's one of the highest range electric vehicles on the market. You can buy a Lucid Air Grand Touring with over 500 miles of range. It has more cargo space and more leg room than the competitors, while being a much smaller vehicle. For 2025, the Lucid Air Pure is the most energy efficient car sold in the United States. The Lucid Air Sapphire had the fastest quarter mile Motor Trend had ever tested when they got their hands on it. And personally in the Sapphire, I did under nine seconds in the quarter mile on a prep drag strip. There's so much breadth in their lineup. This comes from such an impressive situation of incredible integration between the various engineering teams involved, ultimately resulting in one of the best engineered vehicles I've ever experienced. Which is what makes it so surprising to me, that in the end, they don't even know what the color blue is. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. Thanks for watching.