Lucid Air

Lucid has just revealed the details of its model-year 2025 updates, and among the tweaks to its handsome electric sedan is an impressive bump in range efficiency. The entry-level Lucid Air Pure, which starts at $69,900, can now travel 420 miles on a single charge of its 84 kWh battery. That equates to 5 miles/kWh (12.4 kWh/100 km), making the Air Pure the most efficient electric vehicle for sale today.

The range bump is mostly thanks to Lucid making a heat pump standard across the range, after first adding one to the ultra-powerful, ultra-expensive Air Sapphire.

Lucid has also upgraded the computer hardware that oversees the Air’s various subsystems. The automaker says it has tripled processing power and doubled the system’s memory, which should translate to faster and better infotainment. And Lucid has made its advanced driver assistance system standard across the lineup, too.

While the Air Pure might be the first production EV being sold to reach 5 miles/kWh, it isn’t the longest-range Lucid Air for sale. That remains the $110,900 Grand Touring, which can go 512 miles (824 km) on a single charge. The 2025 Lucid Air Touring, which slots between them, has a range of 406 miles (654 km) and starts at $78,900.

While still a relative minnow compared to Rivian, Lucid has been on something of an upward trajectory of late. Price cuts have undoubtedly helped it have a record Q2, delivering 2,394 cars for its best three months so far.

Who did this math?

In addition to claiming 5 miles/kWh for the Air Pure, Lucid also notes in its press release that it has achieved “a record 146 MPGe rating” for the car.

Lucid’s model-year 2025 data isn’t in the EPA’s online fuel economy database yet, so Ars can’t check the slightly more detailed information there (which should break out the MPGe figure into city, highway, and combined figures), but 146 MPGe is only equivalent to 4.3 miles/kWh; 5 miles/kWh is 169 MPGe.

We asked Lucid about the difference, and the company told Ars that with EVs, losses in the charging process from resistance in the cables and from heating the battery make a difference.

“The reason we don’t love MPGe is that batteries are the real expense for EVs—not electricity. If you can be more energy efficient when actually driving, you can reduce the capacity of the battery pack in the vehicles you build—reducing cost, reducing weight, and reducing the natural resources you need per vehicle. On the other hand, it’s nice to minimize energy lost during charging, but if you get only 2.5 mi/kWh on the road, you still are stuck with the big expensive battery pack,” Lucid told Ars.

(This does not change the fact that MPGe is derived by multiplying miles/kWh by 33.7, the amount of energy in a gallon of gasoline, but when the EPA calculates that number it includes charging losses.)

Despite the incongruent math, the 2025 Air Pure still beats the 2024 model, which makes do with a combined 140 MPGe and 410 miles of range, according to the EPA.

When we saw our first Lucid Air prototype in 2017, we came away extremely impressed. This alpha build appeared far more realized than some prototypes, complete with functioning infotainment software as opposed to the pre-rendered demos that are often more common in such cases. But the startup automaker has had anything but an easy time since then. Yesterday, it announced its Q4 2023 deliveries ahead of an investor call in late February, and the numbers are bad.

Lucid originally planned to launch the Air sedan in 2019. Designed by Tesla’s former VP and Chief Vehicle Engineer Peter Rawlinson, together with designer Derek Jenkins, the Air aimed for Mercedes-Benz S-Class levels of space and luxury on the interior but with the footprint of the smaller Mercedes E-Class. Under its ultra-low-drag body was a highly advanced electric vehicle powertrain capable of extremely rapid acceleration, a high top speed, and class-leading range.

But starting a new car company is neither easy nor cheap. Lucid struggled to obtain funding until Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund invested a billion dollars in the company in 2018, allowing Lucid to complete work on its factory in Arizona and push on with developing the Air.

The company then told us that production would begin in 2020—a date that fell by the wayside thanks to the global pandemic that broke out early that year. At the time, Rawlinson told Ars that production was still possible later that year, and the specs it announced were indeed impressive—more than 1,000 hp (745 kW) and a range of 517 miles (813 km) for the launch version, the Air Dream Edition.

But those big numbers were matched by an equally big price—$169,000, or $139,000 for the slightly less powerful, slightly shorter-range Air Grand Touring.

But 2020 came and went without a production car. In 2021, we got our first ride in a release candidate prototype, but Ars wouldn’t get to sample the Air from behind the driver’s seat until just over a year ago. What we found was a car that was very competent in many areas but missing in others, with uneven build quality between cars.

Since then, the company added some cheaper variants to its lineup—Lucid will sell you an Air Pure for $74,000 after its current incentives are taken into account. But that hasn’t resulted in a glut of orders.

For the last three months of 2023, Lucid built just 2,231 Air EVs and delivered 1,734 of those to customers. The results for the whole year weren’t any better—Lucid built 8,428 cars and delivered 6,001 of those.

As you might expect, that hasn’t been especially good for the company’s share price, which has fallen by 20 percent since the start of the week.