Deal Breaker? Why the Lucid Air Isn’t a Good Fit for This Type of Driver
Impressive? Yes. Comfortable? Not for everyone.
The Lucid Air has brought out my inner child, and I love it. In my periphery, I see clouds as paintings in the sky thanks to the uninterrupted view provided by the Lucid's Glass Canopy roof. On a local suburban street, a partial canopy of 100-year-old cedar trees inspire wonder in the Lucid—the view is breathtaking. Unless you have a convertible, the experience is unlike almost anything else on the market today.
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Even so, I'd give up the car's engineering advantages tomorrow for a more conventional cabin. Not even the glass roof or its Car of the Year-winning credentials could convince me otherwise. Here's why.
Duck!
There's a sense of occasion driving a Lucid Air; no other electric car today offers a range of 500-plus miles and such luxury. But you have to be careful. Recently, I was too late to remind my dad to duck on his way into the Lucid, and he bonked his head on his way into the back seat.
This is something we noticed on some of our very first Air drives: The cabin sits lower than you expect. The lower roofline exists to give the car purposeful proportions and to aid aerodynamics. In other words, you're meant to notice the dramatic styling, but air barely notices the Air slipping through.
Our Lucid Air Grand Touring Performance comes in at around 450 miles of driving range, which is impressive for a car with large 21-inch wheels—not to mention 1,050 horsepower. As someone who is 6-foot-4, I've learned to carefully duck my head and crane my neck a bit to enter the car. Perhaps that's nothing for a Corvette owner, but it's not something I want in a sporty luxury sedan.
Stick Your Head Out the Window
Once inside, you start to notice how the A-pillar juts in toward the driver's head. I may be above average in height, but another editor just a few inches shorter also found the cabin a little claustrophobic. Strangely, though, one 6-foot-10 editor has no problem with it. As the cliché goes, your mileage may vary.
For me, those details plus a blue-tinted panel at the top of the windshield make driving more difficult than it should be. Yes, I love the Glass Canopy, which has a single glass panel uninterrupted by any pillar from the base of the hood to the middle of the car's roof. The first time I drove past Los Angeles International Airport in the Lucid, I saw a plane flying overhead toward a runway, a detail that can easily escape your attention in the vast majority of cars with a thick panel of metal interrupting the windshield from a glass panel mounted farther back.
Great! But at night, I feel like I'm driving with sunglasses on because that same tinted panel is unavoidably in my line of sight. Its omnipresence is stressful. Also not great: the awkwardness of sticking your head out the window at an angle to reach an ATM or get food from a drive-through window. The latter I can forgive; did you expect no sacrifices on your way to award-winning engineering excellence?
One tip we received: Adjust the sunvisor down so it appears slimmer in your line of sight. If you're shorter than I am, try one step better: Detach the right side of the visor, turn it upside down, and shove it just above the driver-side window. I can't do it because it pokes me in the head, but if you fit, you'll really have an unobstructed view forward.
This won't be every tall person's experience, but it would have been a deal-breaker if it had been my money.
Our Hot Dog
Perhaps another reason to wait for the Gravity, Lucid's upcoming SUV, is your dog. Ours is a large golden-doodle, and he's a very good boy. So good that I'm waiting for a seasonal temperature shift until I let him back inside the Lucid. Before he sits down, his head nearly touches the back seat's glass roof. A very hot glass roof.
When it's summer in Los Angeles and your glass roof lacks a cover, that's a real problem.
So for our dog, we take the family Subaru Forester when it's time to go on a car ride. As for the Lucid? I've started to use the car's app a lot. To avoid stepping into a cabin that's cooking inside—nearly 140 degrees on the hottest days—I precondition the car from the app.
What to Do?
We maintain that few cars are better for early adopters than the Lucid Air. No other model in the entire country offers more than 1,000 hp yet (in some trims) remains among the most efficient cars ever rated by the EPA. That's astounding, and we continue to appreciate things the car does well as a daily driver.
As a tall person, however, I'd reluctantly spend my fantasy dollars somewhere else even though Air prices are more attractive now. For those who have to have the Air, know that a steel roof is standard on the lowest trim, Pure, and one is offered on Touring, the next one up.
Cool, but that doesn't fix the other practical limitations created by a design that's laser-focused on aerodynamics and efficiency. The end result is styling that turns heads even in L.A., but for me, it wouldn't be worth it. I'd rather wait for the Lucid Gravity or another car.
For More on Our Long-Term 2022 Lucid Air Grand Touring Performance:
- We're Testing the Lucid Air Grand Touring Performance for a Year
- Winter Road Tripping Our Long-Term EVs Has Been Interesting
- An Extreme Winter Test in Our Long-Term Lucid Air Left Us Hot and Cold
- Who Builds a Better Luxury EV? Tesla or Lucid?
- Does a 1,050-HP Lucid Air Belong at the Dragstrip?
- What's the Lucid Mobile Service Experience Like?
- The Lucid Air EV Should Be a Road-Trip Champ. Our 2,300-Mile Trip Exposed a Problem
I’ve come a long way since I drove sugar packets across restaurant tables as a kid, pretending they were cars. With more than 17 years of experience, I'm passionate about demystifying the new car market for shoppers and enthusiasts. My expertise comes from thoughtfully reviewing countless vehicles across the automotive spectrum. The greatest thrill I get isn’t just from behind the wheel of an exotic car but from a well-executed car that’s affordable, entertaining, and well-made. Since about the time I learned to walk I’ve been fascinated by cars of all shapes and sizes, but it wasn’t until I struggled through a summer high school class at the Pasadena Art Center College of Design that I realized writing was my ticket into the automotive industry. My drive to high school was magical, taking me through a beautiful and winding canyon; I've never lost the excited feeling some 16-year-olds get when they first set out on the road. The automotive industry, singing, and writing have always been my passions, but because no one seeks a writer who sings about the automotive industry, I honed my writing and editing skills at UC Irvine (zot zot!), serving as an editor of the official campus newspaper and writing stories as a literary journalism major. At USC, I developed a much greater appreciation for broadcast journalists and became acquainted with copy editing rules such as why the Oxford comma is so important. Though my beloved 1996 Audi A4 didn’t survive my college years, my career with MotorTrend did. I started at the company in 2007 building articles for motorcycle magazines, soon transitioning to writing news posts for MotorTrend’s budding online department. I spent some valuable time in the copy editing department, as an online news director, and as a senior production editor. Today, MotorTrend keeps me busy as the Buyer's Guide Director. Not everyone has a career centered on one of their passions, and I remind myself all the time how lucky I am.
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