LUCID AIR

THIS GAME-CHANGING ELECTRIC SEDAN POINTS THE WAY FORWARD

-  FRANK MARKUS

Automotive progress usually happens slowly, like a white oak sapling growing in a forest. But every now and then a new car jumps off the forest floor like a rainbow eucalyptus, advancing like crazy while making a colorful splash. The Air sedan from startup EV-maker Lucid is just such a car, and its levels of innovation and sophistication are as unexpected as multicolored tree bark.

A year or two ago, most of you and many of us might have said, “Lucid? Is it still going? I thought it was foundering like Byton, Faraday Future, Dyson, Nio..."

Lucid is very much still going. It's helmed by experts cherry-picked from various successful automakers, and it's funded sufficiently to launch this Air sedan while developing its next model, the Gravity SUV.

We weren't wowed by the whopping numbers Lucid has touted recently-up to 1,111 horsepower and 1,390 lb-ft of torque in the Air Dream P edition, and up to 520 miles of EPA-official range in the Dream R edition. Anyone can buy big numbers by installing giant motors and batteries. Rather, it's the sophisticated way Lucid achieves those big numbers in a package that ranks highly in each of our six key Car of the Year criteria that captured our attention and earned our Golden Calipers.

Engineering Excellence

The tiny, power-dense motor that generates those headline-grabbing specs does so with an innovative new stator winding consisting of 24 square copper wires "woven” into a convenient assembly a requiring minimal soldering. To better manage the intense heat these wires generate under full power, Lucid moved the cooling passages down to the narrow spaces between winding channels, utilizing magnetic field "dead zones" in the stator body. The rotor squeezes more reluctance torque out of the same number of rare-earth magnets by optimizing their positioning.