1234bhp Lucid Air Sapphire Review: World’s Best Super Saloon?!

Sorry, Americans, I know that you've had Lucids for a couple of years now, but no one from Top Gear has been able to really drive one or get to know the company yet. So we thought it was high time we change that. Over the past couple of days, we've been to Lucid's headquarters, interviewed their top brass, toured the factory, tried a gravity prototype, and now we're going to have a look at this – a Lucid Air Sapphire. It costs $249,000. It develops 1,234hp. And it'll go from 0 to 60mph in less t

han two seconds. And you know what? None of those facts are the most amazing thing about it. Now, there is just so much you could dig into and get excited about on the Air. You can get excited about our grizzly bear friend here. State symbol of California, that is. You can see him on the wheels as well. There's stuff like the packaging. This thing has a front boot – and it is a front boot, not a frunk – twice the size of the one in a Tesla Model S. It's just vast in there. Then we've got the sh

eer space inside. I mean, we'll get into the interior at the front later, but that's my driving position, 90 degree opening door. And in the back there is an echoingly large amount of room. I mean, EQS is nowhere near this. There's huge boot in the back as well. But I won't take you in there. I'll point down here where the diffuser on this car starts about where my hand is. Not way back there, not some token piece of plastic. It starts there. And they've managed that by curving the battery pack

upwards. And yet you still have all that leg room. There's just been such a depth of thought that's gone into this car. It's a car by engineers for grown-ups. Getting a 2.4 tonne luxury saloon from 0 to 60, with an American roll out in a quoted 1.89 seconds, and from 0 to 100mph in 3.8 seconds is obviously mind-blowing. But if you're anything like me, you're probably already a bit jaded by EVs, which can out-accelerate the electricity that powers them. So don't worry. This isn't a film of tediou

s drag races and stomach-emptying reactions. Left foot on brake, pull down, very chunky, high-quality indicator stalk, Nail throttle. F-BLEEP-ing hell that is f-BLEEP-ing mental. But if you take nothing else away from watching this, what you should remember about Lucid is how they unlock these packaging gains, the mighty range, a massive performance by doing everything the hard way. Almost everything is developed in-house. The miniaturised motors, the control electronics, software suspension, th

e super-slim headlights, the infotainment. Even the traction control is coded by Lucid for Lucid. Now, to comprehend why a car company would choose that very rocky road, you need to climb inside the mind of its boss, Welshman Peter Rawlinson. And yesterday I did just that, actually. Went to his office at Lucid's headquarters, brewed a lovely cup of tea and sat down for a chat, which began with asking him about his catchphrase. There's a catchphrase that's kind of attributed to you by people who'

ve worked with you, past and present. Do you know what this is? I always say, "Every millimetre counts." - Every millimetre counts. - Yes. (Laughs) Is there... I mean, whether it's Lucid or something else in your engineering career, can you give me, like, one example of a piece of bloody-mindedness, a piece of perfectionism, where "Every millimetre counts" is sort of manifested. Oh, goodness. There's too many. There's too many. I mean, first of all, I... you know, I've got many engineers. It fee

ls the car is a... is not designed by any one person, I'm kind of like the conductor of an orchestra. And it's, you know, kudos to all the hundreds of great minds that have created the car, both the Model S and-and with Lucid. But fundamentally they have to follow "Every millimetre counts" as well. Yes, they have to take that-that mindset. I think, if you look at the frunk on Lucid Air, we've got over 10 cubic feet. It's, you know, three or four times the size of the newest competitor. It's not

like 30% more, it's a multiple of. Um, we've got undercuts. The shapes inside the car that we're using and, we've actually had to... that determined the moulding technology of the frunk. We actually have to compress it to squeeze it into shape and it pops out into the shape that it acquires... - Yes, we were showing that earlier. ..and that is that mindset. We're going to use every last millimetre here to extract the maximum performance. And that applies not just to millimetres, it applies to co

unter drag. We've got CD of 1.97. It's the most aerodynamic car, production car, in the world to the best of my knowledge. Let me give you another example. The battery pack is actually curved underneath. Yeah, this is fascinating because you start the diffuser under the b-pillar effectively, don't you? Yeah. - It's a wing car. The b-pillar, yes. And the last few millimetres underneath the battery pack, – it's one of my patents, actually – it's a crumple zone underneath the car. So we have a ball

istic shield under the pack, but then we have a gap between that ballistic shield and the bottom of the cells. So if the shield is damaged or intruded at all, there's a little bit of free crush space for the energy to be absorbed. But statistically, that's highly unlikely to happen. And probably towards the rear of the pack, unless you reverse the at high speed into something. So we eat some of that space, that free crush space away, with the curve of the pack. So it's that free crush space that

we eat into with the curvature of the pack. So all the cells are on the same plane. You wanted to create the best electric car in the world. You were at Tesla, you were the chief engineer for the Model S. What was it about that car and the way it was developed that frustrated or dissatisfied you? Well, I mean, it was a wonderful opportunity for me and fulfillment of a lot of my ambitions that I was allowed to really be a driving force in the creation of what was the landmark electric car of the

century, really. But it did have a number of constraints. One of which was very interesting. It was actually styled, the stylistic design took place before I arrived at Tesla. Franz von Holzhausen designed the shape of the Model S a few months before I arrived. I arrived in January '09 and the shape had been conceived late '08. And that was pretty much cast in stone. So it was an interesting intellectual puzzle really to fit all the technology into that predetermined exterior shape. So that's a

packaging nightmare. It's a packaging nightmare and an opportunity. It's a fascinating puzzle, but it's not the right way to do an electric car, because that shape had been conceived around preconceived notions of what a car should be. And a lot of that is about a long hood for a V8 or a V10. And a windsh... windscreen, I should say, I've become American, windshield, further back. And about these proportions of a car. And that meant that the interior space inside Model S was compromised, for th

e position of an engine which didn't exist. A petrol engine that didn't exist. So we had to move the driver position relatively far back for safety reasons and for ingress, egress, getting in and out of the car, which compromised the rear-seat package. And it was clear to me that if we truly designed a car stylistically and technically in a combined effort, then we could solve for a pure electric solution. And that's when I reached out to Derek Jenkins, convinced Derek to join the company as hea

d of design. And we really created a new methodology, where engineering and design would work together in a creative engineering... in a creative engine room, I should say, in a design studio where we looked at the people package, the occupant package of the car. And we had a new approach to the whole engineering of electric car. Miniaturise the powertrain – it was already small, smaller than a gasoline equivalent. So people thought, "That's great. That's an advantage." But no one had said, "Let

's see how far we can push the envelope." Can we make the powertrain even smaller? Sculpt the batteries around the occupants, design the car from the inside out. And the result with Lucid Air is that on the outside, it's shorter than a Model S. It's narrower and it's lower, but it's got long wheelbase S-Class interior dimensions. [Ollie] We'll hear a little more from Peter in a moment. In the meantime, here's a bit of the spec. All Lucids so far have been dual-motor cars. Though imminently they'

ll be a rear-wheel drive, entry-level version. But this is a Sapphire. Quite an evocative name, isn't it? But effectively, we are talking here about the M version, the AMG version, the Plaid, if you like. This is the top model, as you can tell, because of carbon fibre, ducktail spoiler, the sort of dark and moody trim and carbon ceramic brakes. And if you stripped all of that off, you'd tell even more because it's got three motors, this thing. No more dual-motor, still one at the front but now t

wo at the back. And yet, it's not about a headline power figure this car, not really. I know that's mad... We now live in a world where a 1,234hp luxury saloon isn't a headline power figure, but, hey, it's the world we live in now. That's only about a hundred-and-something horsepower more than the next top Lucid. So if they weren't going for ultimate power figure... and they could have. The engineer said they could have gone up beyond, you know, 1,500hp. But then you just get into the realms of

where there's no tyre on the planet that's going to give you reliable traction all of the time. So instead, they've spent their time sweating out how to do clever torque vectoring with those motors. How you can make the car agile in a way that a normal, limited slip diff couldn't hope to offer. The result is a car that doesn't just knock a Tesla Model S into a cocked hat dynamically. No, what you have here is a luxury saloon that's more spacious and cosseting than a Mercedes EQS. Almost as decad

ent as a BMW i7, but drives with the verve and the precision and the brutal brilliance of a Porsche Taycan Turbo. Welcome to a car where the marketing department was herded into a cupboard and locked away before they started designing it. This is... This is an engineer's car. You can feel that through every control, through every interface, for every decision they made. I find that interesting because Lucid is not shying away from the whole autonomous thing. It knows that if you're going to go u

p against Tesla, Mercedes, whoever else. Everyone's working on the level two, the level three autonomy. Whether you going to have to have your hands on the steering wheel or whether you could be able to just have a nap. There is a certain market that wants the car to drive itself and they are flat out with their lidars and their sensors. And they've got this thing called DreamDrive in the screen here where I can tap away and I could just allow it to follow the car in front of me right now. And y

et, despite working on all of that, they have still spent a fortune on making this thing as good to drive, not just as it can be, but way better to drive, arguably, than most people would ever go finding out. The words that come to mind are ones like ruthless, assured, composed. It's just... it's kind of a vice-free car this. You break it down, it's really difficult to trip it up. Yeah, you start with the steering. It's a really pleasant weight. It's a nice speed, it's very consistent and there'

s no torque steer, despite the fact that the front wheels are dealing with a monumental amount of power, Even the steering wheel itself. It's not too thick, it's not gimmicky. There are no paddles for regen because the regen braking, yeah, it's-it's a one-pedal car and you can adjust it in here, but, ah, it's so well-calibrated. This might be the best pedal-feel of any EV I've driven, I think. I'd want to test it back-to-back with a Porsche Taycan, just to be sure, because Porsche always slaves

over their regen. But this is really, really well-sorted stuff. That's another thing that comes to mind. Everything's well-sorted. Little detail things. The driver assistance stuff isn't overbearing. If you wander towards the middle line here, you just get a very slight nudge to let you know, to rock you back towards middle of the lane. You don't get these alerts and buzzes that a lot of the European cars are doing right now. It's just frankly infuriating and makes you want to turn it off. And i

t's when you start to go a bit quicker, that's when you really appreciate the really expensive Bilstein suspension they've thrown at it. And the body control, the composure this thing has for something so heavy is absolutely outstanding. I would swear I was in something the size of an M3, not with all that loungeable legroom behind me. And it's worth remembering that it's doing all this chassis witchcraft without the witchcraft, without the magic. It doesn't have 48-volt active anti-roll bars.

It doesn't even have air suspension. This is just a really sorted, well-tuned adaptive damper doing the business. That's the good news. The bad news is that Lucid simply isn't selling anywhere near enough cars. Sales targets have been repeatedly slashed over the past couple of years. In 2023, they were aiming for 14,000 sales but barely got past 8,000. And with money being poured into a new Saudi Arabian factory, development of the Gravity SUV and a smaller Tesla Model Y rival, the company bala

nce sheets make for eye-watering reading. Lucid is 60% owned-financed by the Saudi Public Investment Fund. That's right, yes. With such enormous financial resource underneath you like that, is there a ticking clock to reach profitability? Or is it a case of, you know, against you, is there any kind of time pressure? Or is there a sense of you have this massive wealth fund behind you, so ultimately it will take as long as it takes? What I would say is this... What differentiates us as a company i

s I really believe we've got the most advanced EV technology in the world. And we've got incredible backing from the Public Investment Fund. They have been just the most ideal, firm, loyal supporters of this company through thick and thin. However, I feel huge personal pressure to turn this business around. To wait for it to become a profitable entity and put the foundations in place to become just that. But I don't think we should look short-term for this. We're looking... This is a long-term p

lay. And if you look at our finances to date, they're dominated by our long-term investments. We just put 3 million extra square feet into Arizona. We're vertically integrating our stamping plants. We're building out the most advanced electric vehicle power plant in the world. In the first purpose-built electric vehicle factory in North America. We've also got our factory up and running in Saudi Arabia – our semi knocked-down, or SKD, facility. And now we're planning a much bigger plant with a c

apacity, a built-out capacity, of 150,000 units a year. So we've got the first car plant operating today in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And this is a partnership which goes right to the core of Saudi's vision for 2030 to transition away from a fossil-fuel dominated and dependent economy. - There's a certain irony there, isn't there. - There is. The quintessential oil-led economy now investing massively in EVs. - Absolutely, absolutely. But I find that hugely refreshing. And there's a massive in

vestment taking place, not just in our long-term R&D, for the most... the next level of advanced powertrain for our mid-size platform. But also, the tooling investment in getting Gravity into production. We're, you know, we're in the year where Gravity is going to be produced late '24. The cash burn right now in getting that into production, that's a cash-burn investment in our future. Let's not forget that. So, yes, you'd argue it's not a loss, it's an investment. - I believe it is. - Yeah. I w

ant to talk about, again, going back to your career history, you know, you've worked with some great British marques – Jaguar, Lotus. - Yes. - Both of whom are in the midst of relaunching as electric-only brands. - Indeed, indeed. And particularly Jaguar. It's going to be fascinating to see how they kind of revive themselves. Do you think that... are the legacy brands always going to struggle? As opposed to a clean sheet without the kind of styling, historical baggage and the enthusiasm for thos

e cars? And, conversely, like, do you fear them? Because should a legacy brand catch up with you? Or even use your technology? - Yeah. - To get on parity, they then do have this heritage and this legacy that you don't have from a start-up. Yeah, yeah. So, so remember that when I was at Tesla, nobody believed the Model S was real and was going to happen. And very few believed that Tesla had the experience to do an electric car. But I had the best engineering team in the world. I know, I recruited

them. And the same here. How is it that Lucid Air has got more range, more efficient, it's more aerodynamic. It's got more interior space. It's got even the largest frunk. It's the fastest charging car. It's the highest voltage. Why is it better just about every criterion – 0 to 60, 0 to 100. Just performance, range, efficiency, charging speed. Everything. - You've got the top trumps. It's just... it's the top dog. And everybody recognises that. Even handling and performance. Now why is that a

company, Atieva... Lucid, that's got no experience and no heritage – it's because of the prowess of the engineering team. And the engineering team defines how good you are as an engineering company. It's the... it's the collective brainpower of the people that defines the capability of any company. So another company might be 100 years old, but it's how good is their engineering team? But there's another factor here. I don't believe I would have been able to do this at, say, Jaguar, because I do

n't think anyone would have empowered me in my role and my capacity to have the... the influence on a product. And the same is true at Tesla. The influence that I was given to engineer Model S and be able to look at all those interactions. I don't think I would have been given that and granted that in a traditional car company. Now, if a traditional car company, a traditional OE, empowered someone with a suitable expertise and empowered them to that degree, then absolutely they can compete. But

I don't think that those companies are structured to enable that. [Ollie] Of course, anyone who's followed electric car start-up stories before, will know that Lucid's pain right now is kind of nothing new. Rivian burnt through more cash than Heath Ledger's Joker, before it could get itself a footing. And, though it would never be mentioned now by the disciples, there was a time when Tesla couldn't get the Falcon doors on Model Xs to work. It was building Model 3s very poorly in tents, makeshift

bivouacs out the front of the factory. And, I mean, how can I put this without enraging the followers for Tesla? There was an awful lot of Shawshank before they got to the redemption. But the Tesla comparison only goes so far. For one thing, Tesla's flagship saloon, the Model S Plaid, gives you 1,000hp for $90,000. The Sapphire is faster, its handling is vastly more accomplished, and it's leagues better finished inside. But $250,000 for a car that no one's really heard of, versus 90,000 for the

21st-century's most-talked-about car brand. You can see the issue. The incoming, like, Chinese EVs that are coming in all shapes, sizes and budgets, do you think they will... are they actually the threat? Is it not the legacy ones? Is it the newcomers who are backed by the Chinese government? I tell you, if you'd asked me this three years ago, I'd have given you a completely different answer. I'd have said, look, there's a lot of Chinese car companies. None of them are very good. And it's all

changed. - That's interesting. Some of them are frighteningly good. I test drive a lot of vehicles and even sort of Chinese imports. A lot of those are not available here in the US with the import situation. But they're making headway in Europe. Yeah, we're seeing a lot on the road in London. I think some of the Chinese entrants are getting shockingly good. And what you will find is that the gap... the vision is the gap between Lucid and the competition in terms of range through efficiency, not

range through sheer number of batteries. Because anyone can do that. The how many miles per kilowatt hour? That gap is going to grow. And we are determined to grow that gap and build upon our technical prowess. With that momentum, with that, the advantage you say you have in the technology, is it your ambition that Lucid will one day be the most valuable car company in the world? I don't know about dollar price, but I think that why I'm here is I feel passionately about the environment. I feel t

hat we can have a significant contribution in the field of electromobility, in terms of sustainable mobility. And I think that what we are doing is we created a new agenda that is the value of efficiency going further with less batteries, with less energy that's been generated, and having less impact upon the environment that way. And that's true sustainability in my mind. If you look a couple of years ago we were talking about miles per kilowatt hour. No one was talking about it and now it is a

hot topic. But if you look at who's best at that, we're getting 4.74 miles per kilowatt hour with pure rear-wheel drive. No one else is even close. We were talking earlier just before we started recording about, you know, you working 100-hour weeks and being just incredibly driven. Given your kind of career history and what you're doing now, are you a Lucid-lifer? Or are you always going to be hungry for the next startup, the next project, the next...? - Oh, I'm wedded to Lucid. This is my...

this is the culmination of everything I've worked for. - This is where you build your legacy. - Totally. I mean, I've been here for 11 years now. I joined a company which was just a mom-and-pop shop. That supposedly had some technology, and when I joined, I realised there wasn't any. And, personally, I secured the Series C funding, which... and then brought many of my engineers I knew into this company and grew it from there. And it was just a handful of people. And, you know, had a vision for

the next-generation car, which was being realised with Lucid Air. And a vision for creating this next level of technology. You know, if you wind back six years, seven years ago, no one would have thought that we could really advance the electric motor. We made a big commitment here to re-engineer and reconceive what an electric motor could be from scratch. I had some brilliant engineers. And I owe it all to them. I mean, it's not... I'm not a motor specialist. But I realised that we should take

a serious re-look at the electric motor. And so we got a brilliant team of engineers together. Begged them to join. From a transmission standpoint, and motor, put them all together and I said I want a single rotational system. I don't want a motor and a gearbox. I want a motor transmission as a single unit. And, you know, gave them super-compute capabilities and I said, look, I want to see literally electrons flying around atoms and molecules. And I want to see exactly a breakdown to the finest

detail of the electromagnetism that's happening there and the thermal regime. And the team literally reinvented the electric motor. And that's at the core of our breakthrough in efficiency. No one was thinking that way. - On a molecular level. - No. And we make that all in-house. We've built our capability in Arizona. We've got unique manufacturing technologies. We make all our electric motors, our inverters, transmission system. Build that into a drive unit. And that is really at the core of th

e secret behind our range and efficiency And also the software that controls that is absolutely key. [Ollie] Well, it's been absolutely fascinating to get to know not just this car, but this company over the past couple of days. I mean, 48 hours ago, I'd never even seen a Lucid in the metal. Now I've had chapter and verse from the CEO. And as far as their end product goes, there is no doubting that Lucid is really a force to be reckoned with. I just hope this isn't the first and last time I driv

e one. I hope that the company can make it through the cash-burn phase, and maybe bring them over to Europe and to Britain as well, because I think there's a fair few electric adopters, who might like something that's a bit more sophisticated than what's being offered right now.