Lucid Air vs BMW i5 | Worth The Money?

If you're in the market for a rear-wheel drive electric sedan, you're probably in the minority. Most have moved to CUVs and SUVs, and that's because there's a million options now. That's where all the development money is, and they've gotten pretty good to drive. So if you're buying a sedan, it's got to do more than just drive well. So this is where the fundamental difference is between BMW and Lucid. Lucid is a ground-up EV company, and while they have burned an unbelievable amount of money trying to get to the place to reach their vision, it is thought out to be that electric car from the start, where BMW has taken the 5 Series and just dipped their toe in the water. It has to have a V8. It has to have an inline-six. It has to have a transmission. It has to have a mechanical all-wheel drive setup. So the body has to fit all of that. Lucid doesn't have to do that. So in terms of packaging, they've taken a medium-to-large-size sedan and given you the space on the inside and usability as a long-wheelbase luxury car. It almost has the capacity of some small CUVs, and you notice it right away when you pop open the front. The front has the space of a trunk of, like, a sports car. The rear trunk is enormous, and with the hatch and the little cargo divider in the bottom, you can fit so many things in there. And a lot of this is because they've tried to miniaturize their electric motors. They've shrunken down the inverter design. There's all these things that they've done to give you the most usable room you can possibly have in a sedan. Things like the door panels or the way the doors open at almost a 90-degree angle. You feel like you're floating in here, even with the aluminum roof. The back seats are so big. In my driving position, I can probably fit two and a half of me back there, which means if you have car seats or you're using it as a family vehicle, there's far less compromise. It's almost like a two-row SUV or a small CUV. In terms of the feel of it, it does feel very open and airy. It's almost Volvo-like in terms of its design, in terms of cleanliness. It is a low-stress, low-clutter, and despite its software, it is still very simple to use. This is where you start to see the separation between the two cars. BMW has done a lot of iterations in terms of design, so their fit and finish in terms of panel fitment and quietness is much better than the Lucid. The Lucid is definitely about two to four decibels louder than the i5 on our test course at Autobahn Country Club. We measured them both. The Lucid is far more noisy in wheel impacts or road impacts on broken pavement than the i5 is. There's that part. The other issue is the software in terms of electronics. They made it a centerpiece. While it is less distracting by a large measure than the BMW, the screen tech is not as good. There's aliasing in the graphics on both screens. You do have physical controls for core functions here, unlike the BMW now. Volume rocker. There's physical controls on the steering wheel for track selector. Temp, fan speed, volume is on the center stack here, so that's great. So there is some balance here, but everything else is in the touchscreen. I don't think that they've really found the right balance of where they keep physical controls yet. Again, this is something they're going to have to learn as a brand going on. The other part is software experience. If you're somebody that is coming at this and you're heavily reliant on your phone, if you're an Android Auto user, that doesn't exist in this car at this point. If you use Apple CarPlay, Jack's phone had a lot of problems. It worked and then it didn't work. And we both had to rely on Bluetooth most of the time, and then using the mapping software in the car. So if you're married to your phone, this could be an issue for you. There are some other complaints I have in terms of software, and a lot of it has to do with just the way that the car is used in terms of the key system. BMW's proximity key system is amazing. It always works. This car, you can come up with a key and it doesn't recognize the key. You can leave the key in the car and it might lock the doors on you. And it's that frustrating part about not having usability. And I know the argument originally was they wanted to be more efficient. So having door handles that went in the car were better for reducing drag and airflow. But here's my thing, what is that really worth at the end of the day if you can't use the core functions of the car? And that's the thing that the Lucid struggles with more than the BMW at this point. The other thing is the audio system. The audio system here is inferior to the BMW's. Even the Harman setup, there's far more harmonic distortion in the Lucid. And you can see it on the charts. There's phase issues and there is definitely some driver knock in the door. And you see it in the graphs. You can see a 10 to 15 dB swing in terms of frequency response in the mid-range and even in the upper mid-range. And it's definitely audible. It definitely has some tuning issues in trying to control that sound. And then the RT60 decay time is far higher in the Lucid. Which means that it takes longer for sound to deaden in here. It just has more of a reverberation or cancellation effect in here than the BMW. So that's something else that they're going to have to work on as a luxury car brand. It's pretty obvious that BMW spent a sizable budget on their audio system design and their interior space. The exterior of the 5 Series is also far more conservative compared to some of their other products like the iX. Where they kind of really went to the next extreme to try to make them look different. The 5 Series still looks very traditional, even the electrified variant. Other than the grille, it's hard to tell them apart from the internal combustion counterparts. And that's by design. They want to transition people over from their internal combustion cars and get them into electric vehicles. The inside, however, is more of a retrofit. You can tell that this interior space was not designed to have this threaded screen and what they're trying to do with ambient lighting. So it feels far more plastered in. It doesn't feel as cohesive. And it doesn't feel like this interior was built from the ground up to do that. Unlike the iX, which I'm a huge fan of because they are going in a new direction but leading forward with that technology. And BMW's say the technology works. Even in the 5 Series, the threaded screen and the way the infotainment works, this piece of software is so developed that they probably could license out the technology to other brands. That's how good it is in terms of a car interior. When you think of automotive user interfaces and OSs, Tesla has kind of reinvented the wheel with this. And then BMW has been one of the longest stand-in players in this. And their software is really that good. The question is, they haven't figured out how to balance physical and touch controls with it. They just went from one extreme to another. And I think it's turned a lot of people off. In terms of interior comfort, it doesn't feel as roomy as the Lucid. However, the base seats in the BMW are better than the base seats in the Lucid. The i5 does not have a frunk, a real frunk. And the trunk, however, is very big. It is a chasm. And when you fold down the seats, it is that tried-and-true mid-sized, large-sized sedan in terms of space. The backseat comfort is also great. The other thing to talk about is charging. And Jack went to a 350-kilowatt Level 3 charger to charge both these cars from 5% state of charge at night when nobody else was out, when the grid wasn't taxed. And what he found is, plugging both these cars in that way independently, he still couldn't get the advertised charging rate for the Lucid, despite it being a higher-voltage architecture. And Lucid went basically a generation ahead in terms of battery, motor design, and electrical architecture. It's designed to charge at a very high speed. The reality is, we're not seeing those at our traditional high-speed chargers. We're never getting the advertised speed. And it's not really the car's problem. It's an infrastructure problem. So where BMW makes the excuse that you don't need an over 400-volt architecture in this generation of car because you never get that charging speed, they do have a point because they charge almost identically. In terms of battery efficiency, the Lucid is far superior, even without a heat pump. We were seeing as much as 4.7 miles per kilowatt hour, where the BMW pretty much maxed out around 3.5. Now in real world, it's much different. The Lucid is advertised at over 400 miles range, where you're really getting closer to 350. And the BMW is right around that 290 to 280 miles of usable range in your real commute. So all these factors are there for electric cars, and it's just something to talk about. Jack's going to take these cars in the shop and tell you a little bit about the technical side. In the shop are both the Lucid Air Pure rear-wheel drive and this BMW i5 e40. So let's talk about the i5 first because that's what we're underneath. Now from a philosophical perspective, at least engineering and product planning, these are two very distinct cars. The i5 has the burden of being built on a shared platform with a regular 5 Series. BMW positioned the i5 to just be the electric version of the regular 5 Series. They wanted the way it looked, the way you interacted with it, and for the most part, the way it drove to feel essentially identical. So it's basically the same car. All you are picking as a customer is, do you want a four-cylinder, a six, two electric motors, or one? This is the e40 variant, so let's talk about what it is. The e40 is a rear-wheel drive single motor variant of the i5. That rear motor makes 295 foot-pounds of torque unless you put it into overboost, which for 10 seconds, you get 317 foot-pounds of torque, and the total horsepower output is 335. All versions of the i5 use the same battery pack. It's that 400-volt architecture that you're used to in the iX. It has 72 cells, and it's made up of four modules. The reasons on a 400-volt architecture is, well, that's what it's on, and BMW claims that's not a con because in the real world, and this is largely true, charging infrastructure can't really support an 800 or a 900-volt architecture like in the case of the Lucid Air Pure. Now, what else is there to talk about? Back to suspension. This car is very, very heavy. It is 4,900 pounds. I'll put it on the scales, you can get to see the weight balance. It is heavier than the Lucid Air. More importantly, for the BMW, it is heavier than its internal combustion variant. However, again, that transparency and that driving philosophy between the regular 5 Series and the i5, the ride frequency of the springs is very, very similar to the regular 5 Series. This has the M Sport package, so it's raised a little bit further, just like you can do on the regular 5 Series. And to negate that substantial weight gain, there are now stroke-dependent dampers front and rear. The springs in the front are coil springs or steel springs, just like in the traditional 5 Series. However, in the back, you get air springs, again, to deal with the weight, and it helps level out the rear end a little bit. It is an open diff vehicle. In fact, both versions of the i5 are open diff. So it uses its slip actuator control over the rear motor, which is a combination of motor control and brake control in the back to do its best to put power down. While it kind of feels like a limited-slip differential, they have a much different goal with this setup than Lucid does. It's about stability and allowing you to get out of corners without a lot of wheel spin, where in the case of Lucid, they want you to be able to slide it around like a traditional sports sedan. With all that said, let's go talk about the Lucid Air Pure rear-wheel drive. Now, let's talk about the Lucid Air Pure rear-wheel drive. Now, we've already done a standalone video on this car in our docu-film on the Lucid Air Sapphire and its development. This is on Lucid's own dedicated EV architecture, and to be fair, just like the i5, they were trying to make this the best car possible versus a gimmicky EV. The advantage of it being on a dedicated EV platform, though, is efficiency, both in packaging and motor design and basically everything else to do with this vehicle. It is a more efficiently engineered car. It has more efficient motors. It has more efficient shape when it comes to aerodynamics and a much better use of its interior space. Now, let's talk about electric motors and some of the high-level technical bits. It has a single motor in the back. It is the same Lucid motor that you find in all their other vehicles. It's incredibly compact. We do a long, deep dive into the tech, but in short, it makes 430 horsepower and 406 foot-pounds of torque. And just like in the i5, it is an open-diff vehicle. Just like the i5, it's using brakes and motor control to simulate a limited-slip differential in the back. However, this isn't only about getting you off the line with the least amount of slip possible. The engineers behind this car all own things like E39 M5s or Chevy SSs, and they wanted this to feel like that big V8 sedan. So when you turn everything off, you can get this thing to slide around. While at lower speeds, just to do the fact that it is, again, simulating a limited slip, you can feel the brakes interfere a little bit more in the back, at higher speeds, this thing will yaw out like a traditional sports sedan. And it is a very, very good time. Now, what about the battery packs and all the other fun stuff? This has 16 modules. It is an 88-kilowatt-hour pack. And its electric architecture is 756 volts. When it comes to suspension, just like the i5, it is double wishbone front, multi-link rear. It uses Bilstein dampers. They are active or adaptive front and rear. And it uses coil springs front and back. This car feels more like a traditional sports sedan of yesteryear, and they really did try to focus on those sorts of dynamics. So it has a tremendous-feeling steering rack. And unlike the i5, it doesn't use brake-by-wire. You have a traditional brake pedal with real feedback in this thing. The other thing I'm briefly gonna talk about is weight. This is 4,500 pounds. You can find that would be almost 100 extra horsepower this thing makes. It is a substantially faster or quicker vehicle than the i5 is. But with that, I think it's time to go take this thing for a quick drive. Jack, I need you to ask yourself, how big do you want your lease payment to be this month? We're at Audubon Country Club. Neither of these cars are race cars, but we figured this was the safest and easiest way to demonstrate some of their dynamics. And Hans Zimmer. Hans, take me on the worm ride. So what do you... I'm just gonna one-hand it, really. Oh, look. The stability control does everything for you, Jack. Even with it technically off in full-off mode. Interesting. You know, on paper, and this has been the theme of this entire video, these cars are remarkably similar, right? They're both rear-wheel drive premium-class EVs. They're almost the same physical size. You know, they're supposed to be this, like, luxury car, sports sedan thing. And what the i5 does better than the Lucid is the luxury car part. Meaning it's quieter. It has all the interior gimmicks and tech, like all the modes. It has way better infotainment. It has this more, like, isolated, isolation chamber feel behind the wheel in general. The thing it does much worse is the sports sedan part. And can you walk me through why? Well, I drove this back-to-back with the Lucid, and it took me all of about 10 minutes to be completely annoyed by the way this thing drives. And people ask this all the time, because I get BMW, modern BMW, a hard time when people don't understand what I'm talking about because the cars are so fast and capable. But what's lost here is any type of physical input you have with the car is completely unnatural. The calibration is just not normal. And what I mean by that is, like, the brake pedal, it's brake by wire, clearly. But it just, there's not a progressive linear ramp of what you're doing with the brake. So if you push it down, sometimes it's like full force. Sometimes it's not easy to ease into it where it feels natural every time. It's like on and off switch, and then you combine the regen part of it. It just doesn't feel natural. The steering is, you know, nobody cares about steering feel. But again, it's just so overly quick. And then because there's such a delay in the chassis, but there's a disconnect between the front and the back compared to the Lucid, where there's this natural progression between what the front and the back end are doing. When you turn this car, because the steering is so quick, like if I just rip in here, like it takes probably like 15 milliseconds before the back starts to come in, and it always feels this level of disconnection. So to me, this is not a very good driving experience when you compare it to the Lucid as a sports sedan. And clearly as a luxury car, it's a completely different thing because when you're going straight, what do you want? It's quiet. The ride refinement is really good. I don't think the overall damping from 0% to 100% of like load is as well calibrated as the Lucid. This feels more soft and compliant most of the time, but when you really load it up, it doesn't handle as well as Lucid does. And when I say that, I already discussed like that connection feel, it's not there. But that's my main thing about this car. It has much like the modern 5 Series that I talked about in the shop. This has a very overall high level of capability, particularly given what this car is, right? It's the base model luxury i5, but it lacks the naturalness that the Lucid has despite both of these cars being EVs. But it comes down to, to your point, what you prioritize and what matters to you in a sedan-based purchase. My last question for you, Mark, how does this compare to the regular 5 Series? Unlike the Lucid, right? The advantage BMW has is, or disadvantage, depending on how you look at it, is this is built alongside the regular 5 Series. It is largely the same as the regular 5 Series. How does this driving experience compare to, admittedly a different car, but similar to the 530iX that we just had? It's hard because you're comparing two cars. BMW is known to be the king of sedans, right? They mastered this formula. They have a long time, a long history of this. So, you know, as you get in both of them, I have this sense that, you know, much like the internal combustion car, it feels very much the same. And I think it's a blessing and a curse. We talked about the previous Lucid we drove, the Lucid Air, the rear wheel drive version, that it feels like the future of EV sports sedans because it has a character and it has some sense that you're still driving the car. This is just basically, there's nothing going on here. No character, no feel. There's no, like, emotion to it at all. It's just dead. It pains me to admit that. Like, there are elements of this that I think are better, like the quietness. Yeah. Versus the Lucid, and of course, it's just a regular 5 Series. But the thing that I don't think it does particularly well is make you want to drive the vehicle. You bought this or you're gonna lease this thing more realistically because you like the dealer network, you like the quietness, you like the comfortableness, and you just want to view this as a luxury appliance. It's not a car that I feel like you grow particularly emotionally attached to when you're driving. All right, Mark, with that, let's head into Lucid. Lucid Air Pure rear wheel drive. Now I can turn everything off, Mark, because I know what I'm gonna get myself into. Again, we're using Audubon to simulate what a fun back row would be like. What you're gonna do on the road. And, you know, I don't think a lot of people are gonna be doing that with their Lucid rear wheel drive Pure model that they're paying. This car is $71,000 as Tesla due to its larger wheels. But the fact that this has the more traditional feel of like an old BMW, like an E39 M5, soft suspension, really easy inputs. With these Eco tires, you can just obliterate them whenever you want to. And then you saw that more traditional feeling front end. You've talked about it. We've talked about it a lot. The steering rack is better calibrated. You have real brakes, like as in, it's not an E pedal. It's a physical connection to the front calibers. So you know how much brake to give it. And in the real world, that means your inputs are less herky-jerky. You're not driving your passengers nuts in traffic. I think a lot of the core things about this car, despite it being sort of this like futuristic pure EV concept are more organic for the people who like driving. It's a better driving car in every single regard, which is sad to say, because I want to clarify something. It's not just because you could do that and the BMW can't. It has nothing to do with going sideways because you know, all these new EVs will do this like drift party trick all day long. It's not just a normal feeling. The front and the end work well. So the thing to note about how this car slides, and I'll do my best to talk myself through it, is at lower speeds, you feel more of the rear brake cutting in. And to be fair, because it's trying to simulate a differential and there isn't one back there, at lower speeds, the difference between the two speeds of the left and the right tire are greater. So it needs more brake. At higher speed, it's more of the motor control than the brakes. So it feels like a traditional limited slip differential. That's the thing I really appreciate about driving this car. The BMW won't let you go sideways because its philosophy is, what's my zero to 60 time? How can I be efficient? This has the yob-ness that you want in a big stupid sedan that was designed by people who clearly love to do really stupid things like this. I mean, if you're buying a rear wheel drive car in this era, like a sedan, yeah, you wanted to be able to do that. This is important. It really is because this is becoming more of a niche thing. Everything's going all wheel drive and every single electric car is going to be going all wheel drive because of that. So this becomes that car that if you wanted to do it, you can. And if you still want good driving dynamics, that's why you buy this. And unlike the Sapphire, I'm starting these drifts at like 40 miles an hour. Instead of 95. And ending them at like 65. So it's like, okay, your underwear is in full. Where in the Sapphire, those drifts, I was starting at like 95 miles an hour and then exiting the corner at a buck 20. Yeah, your risk of getting airlifted out with a helicopter is a lot higher in the Sapphire. So I guess, let's just kind of sum this up before you get into the final thoughts. Clearly, BMW has an edge in the luxury car refinement area. It's a better luxury car. As they should, really, as they should. We can give them a pass at Lucid for some of these things not being sorted out yet. But, you know, that's going to change over time. So I think rear wheel drive sedan EV, enough said. Final thoughts on the i5 versus the Lucid Air. First off, thanks to our BMW and Lucid reps for providing so much technical information, even the engineers. That time that you spend helps us to tell the story and how much work goes into things. Also, big thanks to Audubon Country Club who continue to support our endeavors to bring better quality product to people and learn about these cars that we're talking about. So I think it's pretty obvious at this point without beating a dead horse, when you build something from the ground up, it makes way more sense. The Lucid Air is a far better sedan than the i5, at least the electrified variant at this point, because it has to do one thing and that is be a good electric car. From range, efficiency to drivability, their core focus on the calibration of braking, suspension, steering, all the things that this car does so much better than the BMW. Where they lag behind is in the things that, you know, to be fair, needs a lot of iterations to get better. Fit and finish, quietness, refinement, electronics is a huge one, and this is one that could definitely kill this brand if they over rely on it and don't make it work. And then overall, the BMW is definitely far ahead in terms of the brand prestige game. I don't think a lot of people know what Lucid is. They have no idea what they are or what they're trying to do and that could hurt them in the long run. So, you know, really, at the end of the day, it's what you value. Do you want a rear wheel drive sedan that acts like a rear wheel drive sedan? Then the Lucid is definitely your choice. If you want a more refined luxury car and you want electronics that are in many cases overbearing but cutting edge and work, the BMW is far superior in terms of that. It's going to wow you with more gimmicks. So I'm going to leave you with that. I'll let you make your best decision and thanks for watching this video.