The 2026 Lucid Air Touring Is The Jaguar That Jaguar Never Made…

Read the transcript here:

When we get comments from the audience, you, our beloved viewers, often tell us that what you want us to do is review the most prosaic form of every vehicle. You want us to look at the base models and see what those are like for the cars you’re actually likely to buy.

And so we tell automakers that, and then they send us the highest trim variant with every single option box ticked, and maybe a few extras thrown in. But to be fair, when Lucid offered us the chance to drive the Lucid Air sedan, we said, “Is this the base model?” And they said, “No, we’ve got the top-end model.” And I was like, well, our audience don’t really like us reviewing quarter-million dollar cars, which is almost the price of the range-topping Lucid Air Sapphire.

So Lucid, to its credit, waited until this was on the press fleet. It’s the 2026 Lucid Air Touring. Full disclaimer, it’s not the Lucid Air Pure, which is the entry-level model. Great name, Pure, by the way. Yeah. I really like that. And this is kind of the next level up. Now, above this is the Lucid Air Grand Touring, and then the very top end, which will break your bank, is the Lucid Air Sapphire.

This car starts at about 80,000 US dollars, which for many people, us included, is… it’s well out of most people’s price range. But in the Lucid Air family, this is the air bubble, quote, “more affordable” version. And Lucid is going to let us play with it. Would you like me to go first? Yeah, well, I have this feeling I might end up doing most of the driving, so go on. This is unprecedented. This is the future.

I feel like I’m back in the UK. I feel like this is almost like what a Jaguar XJ EV should be. Yeah, it definitely has that kind of luxurious feel. And it’s just the way that they’ve done the instrumentation; it gives that kind of impression.

This car has lots of beams, right? It can do the 0-60 sprint in what, three and a bit seconds, three and a half? 3.4, and it’s got 620 horses, which is what, 400 and some kilowatts? Yeah, 462.

Now, the entry-level Lucid Air, the Pure, is a rear-wheel drive vehicle. This is the cheapest all-wheel drive Lucid Air that you can get, and you definitely feel that sure-footedness.

One of the things that I really noticed when I was driving it with a little bit more vigor through roads like this is that adaptive suspension actually comes into its own in a way which I really wasn’t expecting. It is very kind of glidy when you go down the freeway. But on these kinds of roads, even when the surface got, shall we say, less good, it actually handled itself with a great deal of aplomb.

Now, you have tweaked the regenerative settings for this car. It’s fully customizable with the regen, fully customizable with the drive setting. Right now, we are in the quote-unquote smooth mode. There are also two other modes that are increasingly more performance-oriented, right? The Swift and the Sprint.

Yes, yeah, they’re down here. This central unit is very nice and easy to switch them. It sits there on the screen. You just tap it and it goes into those different modes. There’s no delay. It’s not doing anything like lifting or lowering the suspension. There’s no ride height change. So you don’t have that kind of pause that you get with vehicles that are doing that. But yeah, it flicks between the modes. Sprint is significantly more perky.

And you can also adjust the regen independently of the mode that you are in. The most aggressive regen that you can set is almost too much. So you lift your foot off the accelerator, and it snaps almost immediately. This is not the most aggressive setting right now, but in town, that setting is so aggressive, it does cause a little bit of discomfort to your passenger.

I also have to say, and this is one of my pet peeves—and I know we’re getting into pet peeves early—when it’s fully charged, it effectively disables that regen. There is no alert, no warning, no indication that it has done that.

So this morning, that was the first time I’d actually fully charged the vehicle, pulled out, went to the first stop sign, let my foot off the accelerator, expecting to be slowed down. And the car just carried on rolling.

Now, I’m going to correct you there, because when that happened to me, the car did tell me, hey, it’s going to behave differently because the battery is full. There was a warning somewhere on the display, but it was only a transitory warning. I don’t know. I did not see one.

So yeah, and that’s one of the things that I really feel in a vehicle in this price point. It should be mimicking that level of regen by using the friction brakes in those circumstances, or using a dump capacitor or something else.

And it’s worth noting, three weeks ago, at the time of filming, I went to see the new 2027 Chevrolet Bolt EV. The engineers were very proud of the fact that they have eliminated the difference between the car’s battery being fully charged and how the regen performs when it’s not fully charged. They’ve said, yeah, we’ve made the regen behave exactly the same, regardless of state of charge.

And if Chevrolet can do that on a sub-$30,000 car, Lucid should be able to do the same thing.

Now, I don’t know if that is a software limitation or a hardware limitation. I suspect it’s a hardware limitation in the current generation. But I would love Lucid’s engineers to actually look into that and see: do we just need to allow for a little bit of extra battery capacity or at least some regen braking?

But no, having that full coast reminds me very much, actually, of the original Tesla Model S, which, given the Lucid’s origins, is not entirely surprising.

We should also talk about the speed limit warning here. It has been inconsistent throughout my time. It does spot signs on the road. It reads road signs and tells you what the posted speed limit is. But if you start your journey in an area where there’s no posted speed limit, as we did today, and you drive somewhere where there’s no posted speed limit, it defaults to 25 miles an hour. And I can tell you, the road we are driving on right now is most certainly not a 25 mile per hour top speed.

I also have to say, this car is such a narc. It bings and bongs at you every time you drive slightly over the speed limit. Yeah, one or two miles an hour over the speed limit, which obviously I would never do normally. But perhaps on an occasional incident it did occur. Eventually, I worked out what the time was, and then I was like: it’s just telling my wife every time I press the go pedal.

There are some downsides, though. Driving this car, I’ve learned to appreciate the importance of OEM parts supplies. I want you to listen to this.

Oh. So this is the indicator. There’s nobody behind us, so we’re just going to sit here for a second. But the indicator is not even working consistently. Not only that, sometimes whatever software is driving it will get confused, and it will either miss or throw in a beat in entirely the wrong place. As a music major, I was very upset. It took me about 20 minutes of driving it to realize why I was getting so irritated with the indicator. Initially, I thought it was the sound, but no. It keeps missing the beat. And the whole thing just doesn’t make sense.

I did find it staggeringly aggravating. I think what happened is that, as with any automaker, they’re coming up with their parts list and their build list. Lucid is a very agile, software-driven company. This is a software-defined vehicle, designed to be upgradable and to learn new things over time. As a consequence, I suspect a lot of the discrete components within this vehicle just don’t exist—discrete components that you would find in more traditional OEM cars.

I think somebody clearly looked at the code for an indicator and decided they could write that in software, drive a digital output that would drive a relay, which would then drive the indicators. Clearly, the processor scheduling for the indicator is not necessarily as high a priority as some other systems. And so sometimes the car kind of forgets to do it. I think that can also be an explanation for why the automatic windshield wipers are pretty poor.

But the switchgear is good. How it works is, instead of having a traditional rotary knob or control cluster to the left of the steering wheel, as you’d find in most vehicles, it’s just an extension of this massive touchscreen, which I think is like, what, 30 inches across, something like that?

This curved screen is very clear and very easy to use. Here, there is a big cluster of software buttons that you can press to activate whatever function you want. That includes the lights and the wipers. I’m curious as to how this got past U.S. federal motor vehicle safety standards, because I thought light controls and wiper controls had to be physical buttons, although, as you mentioned, on Tesla, it’s not either.

There are multiple options for your windshield wiper. You can have off, auto low, auto high, and then there’s a line and then two lines. The line and the two lines are basically slow wipe and fast wipe on a manual setting, which is fine. I don’t have a problem with that.

What I do have a problem with is that the auto-sensing wipers are terrible. Coming up to drop the car off for you at the weekend, it was chucking it down with rain, but it was a bright sunny day. Lots of rainbows, very pretty. But I think the car was going, oh, it’s sunny, can’t possibly need the wipers. And I’m like, that’s a lot of spray from the other cars. I would end up switching it to manual.

We should also mention that the windscreen divert function is not quite as clear as I would like it to be. There’s a button in the center touchscreen and also on the left that allows you to clear the windscreen. The one on the left, I’ll take that. If I hit that, I want it to be hot air, right? But in the center screen, if I’ve set the temperature of the air conditioning to cold and then tell it to start sending that air over the windscreen, I want it to be cold air, not hot. It defaults to hot.

It resets itself away from whatever you’ve set, which is a weird UI decision. It just is.

I’m going slowly around this because Mount Hood is out today, and wow, I want to talk about the turning circle on this. For low-speed maneuvering and parking lots, it’s a bit of a barge. It is.

When I took the car the first day, my first trip was to our local farmer’s market, because, yes, I am that kind of granola bougie lesbian. I know. It’s OK. I grow my own. So ditto. I pulled into the parking lot and I was like, oh, I’ll back into the space because I’m British. And yeah, I started and then I was like, no, I’m not even going to make this. Let’s restart. This is embarrassing.

The cameras on this are very good. You can use them to see where you’re going and back in or pull forwards, and that’s fine. It has the auto parking, which is part of the Dream Drive software, and we’ll come to that a bit later.

At slow speed, the steering is not exactly tight. At high speed, the steering is lovely.

You have to actually be moving at more than about 10 miles an hour for the steering to make sense. Yeah. And this is—I mean, when we’re traveling this slowly, this is when you start to feel like the suspension just isn’t quite as rapidly adaptive as it maybe needs to be.

But as I said, those kinds of things at low speed, I’m not sure how much they’re going to bother just sort of this vehicle. And then look, if you have a long gravel drive, as you might if you are someone who can afford a Lucid—we just did a little bit of gravel road. There was a bit of tarmac missing, so we had to go over some gravel road. It did OK. Yeah. I’ve driven far worse. Acura. Naming no names. ZDX. It loses a bit of its glidiness over the gravel, but it’s comfortable.

You know, if you need to go to your country house at the weekend, again, it’s got the pedigree. And I think you can tell that this car was built by a company started by someone who had a lot of time at British luxury automakers, at a time when they were actually producing vehicles that people might want to buy.

Yeah. And the fit, finish, and trim of this—even the materials—there’s this on the side of the tunnel here. What does that remind you of? I don’t actually know. I’m thinking barber jacket. Oh, OK. Yeah, no, I can see that. Barber jacket tween.

I have to press a button. If we’re going to talk about the interior, I have to press a button. What is that? So that, ladies, gentlemen, and non-binary pals, was the release for the glove box. I feel like something a little quieter might be nice.

And as we’re talking on switches, let’s talk about the fact that there’s like a 50% chance that when I indicate, I’m also going to activate the windscreen wipers.

All right, let’s do a speed test. Here we go. Even with my foot buried to the floor, it doesn’t scrabble. It doesn’t. That was in smooth. That was in smooth. If you put it in sprint, yeah, you’re going to get a little bit more. You’re going to get a little more spiciness to your acceleration.

But I will note that it’s very easy to speed in this car. It is. It is because it is incredibly quiet. And you’re doing above the speed limit before you know it. So if you value your license, you need to be very good at paying attention to the dashboard, which is very clear and easy to follow. And in the driver’s line of sight, which is a nice feature, one that some other automakers maybe should consider, in addition to the screens up here, which this is: touchscreen on the left, touchscreen on the right as well, where it will display Android Auto, Apple CarPlay if you want.

It’s a very dinky screen. Yeah. Very high resolution, right? Yeah. Pleasant to use.

And then you have this large screen down here, which I think is about 12 and 1,500 inches, if I remember correctly.

And this, in addition to having the controls for how you are using the vehicle—drive modes, steering wheel adjustments, seat adjustments, things like that—you can also control the charging and change the theme of the vehicle. So if you want a different color, you can have your displays blue or sort of vaguely red. And your ambient lighting as well, slightly different.

Then, if you want to get to the weird—cubby hole. Not a very helpful cubby hole, you just kind of swipe up. If voila, you have a space in which you can store things that you don’t actually need to secure. Some packets of Walkers crisps. That’s very British, Kate. Well done. I know. Maybe a couple of pork pies. Yeah.

I mean, look, it’s also very important to know that you can hide that and still drive the car. So if you’re someone who doesn’t like a lot of displays and lights at nighttime, you could actually flick that up at nighttime to eliminate some of the in-car light. It’s also worth noting that you can reach that cubby hole if you have reasonably small hands and arms. I was able to get my hands in there and retrieve my cell phone without using that particular function because there are these gaps here on the flying mattresses. But that’s OK too.

I also should draw your attention to the fact that there’s another screen in the car. That’s one in the back. Along with two USB-C sockets. So if you have children, or more likely for a car of this cost and price point, maybe you have friends or aging relatives who wish to power things in the rear, that’s doable. It’s not a lot of sockets though. It is only two.

It also allows individual climate control in the rear if you opt for the four-zone climate control instead of the three-zone climate control.

We have switched over, and you commented when you got in how far out the door goes. Yeah, it’s really—it’s far out, man. I mean, that is useful if you are someone who has limited mobility. It is, but it is also like a bit of a stretch. If you have the door fully open, you can’t actually reach it if you’re seated because, unlike some cars which move their seat with their easy entry system—that, as soon as you open the door, figures out who you are and moves your seat to that position—this one waits until you’re inside the car and you’ve put your foot on the brake. And then it moves your seat into the driving position.

Yeah, which leads to me sitting there looking like a little girl waving her feet in the air because I’m like, I can’t reach the pedal. Well, I’m definitely not small. And I struggled with that too. But look, I’ve set my seat into the comfortable position. I have so much leg room. I can actually stretch my feet out and not hit the front of the passenger compartment.

Yeah, I mean, that is one of the things that they really push in their advertising. One is being able to drive from somewhere in California to somewhere not in California on one charge, which is true. Lots of range, but also lots of leg range because it has lots of legroom front and back actually.

And I’ve got my cheat sheet here because it’s very complicated. You can have a 12-way heated front seat, which is standard. Then, if you pay a little bit more, you can have a 14-way adjustable seat with cooling. And I should point out that the heated and cooling seats are zonal. So if you just want to cool the cushion, the seat cushion, and not the seat back, you can do that. Same with heating. Also, bonus points, it doesn’t turn them off or get like after a few hours say, no, no, that’s enough of the three heat. Now you should have two, which I like—a hot butt. Yeah. What can I say?

You can also buy a 20-way adjustable seat with a massage function, which this one doesn’t have. Yes, I noticed that when I was coming down. Very disappointed.

And in talking about specs, I know you had a bit of a bugbear about this. The sound system is called the Surreal Sound. It’s a nine-speaker system. I missed that. OK.

And then, if you pay extra, you can get 21 speakers of the Surround Sound Pro with Dolby Atmos, which means they paid the Dolby licensing fee. They did pay the Dolby licensing fee. I mean, it’s not that it’s a bad sound system. And again, we’ve had this before with vehicles where it’s technically very competent, but it lacks soul. And that’s how I feel about this. It does nothing for me. I put on an American Sawbones and I’m like, yeah, yeah. It goes loud. It goes quiet. Controlling it from this is very annoying because when you say you want it loud, it takes a second or two for it to register, which is obnoxious.

I think with a lot of EVs, someone in the company is saying, we need to have this technically very proficient sound system. But they don’t have someone who actually likes music listening to it.

Well, I think it’s also everyone’s ears are different, right? I mean, that’s something that Apple has been working very hard to do with its personalized sound system for its headphones. But, you know, the cabin is very calming and very quiet. And you would think that that would aid with the audio. I don’t know if it always does.

Let’s talk about the rear of the cabin, because there is a lot other than that center touchscreen display, which, as I alluded to earlier, you can expect with either three or four-zone climate control. There are also integrated rear seat shades. So if you pull up on the rear window, once the window is fully up, then you can engage an electrically adjustable shade that comes up. There’s also a shade for the rear side windows, which gives you real privacy in the rear. And that can emphasize the fact that this car is one that is designed to be used more as an executive sedan than as a family car.

The legroom in the back is also a testament to that. Yeah, I mean, I think that does speak to its target market, which I suppose makes it interesting that it does only have the two USB-C sockets, because you would feel that maybe you would want more back there, like a power socket, as some vehicles do. I mean, it does kind of very nicely lean itself toward, you know, it’s sold in Europe, it’s sold in the US, and it’s sold in Saudi Arabia. And it does kind of very much appeal to that Saudi buyer driven somewhere and sit in the back while your chauffeur does the driving.

The ride is very much tuned for overall cabin comfort more than it is to egg you on. And that’s something I do want to come back to. This car has the same kind of power as a Porsche Taycan, a Mercedes-Benz EQE, AMG EQE, or perhaps even some of the BMW EVs. But it’s not delivered in the same way. It’s not delivered in the, come on, you could go faster, you could go faster, you can go faster. This is more about a, oh, something bad has happened and we need that power to get out of trouble.

We talked about efficiency. Even at higher speed, it’s incredibly good. Yeah, it gave me three point something miles per kilowatt-hour on the way down this morning. I would love us to live in a world where, when you bought a car at this level, you were expecting really exceptional efficiency. I would like to live in the world where Lightyear was successful. But we don’t.

And in its place in the market, given the size of the vehicle, the size of the battery pack, which is 92 kilowatt-hours—yeah, standard—the standard range effectively is 92 kilowatt-hours. If you go for the Sapphire, that actually grows to 120 kilowatt-hours. So 92 kilowatt-hours for us here, it’s about 700 volts. I should also note, without taking away your train of thought, that the 120 kilowatt-hour battery in the Sapphire is actually higher voltage as well.

No, anyway, you were saying. Oh, so just that, given the size of the vehicle, the weight of that battery pack, all of the things about it, it’s a luxury sedan, three point something miles per kilowatt-hour—not bad.

No, not bad at all. The coefficient of drag is 0.197, which, again, is very good for a large vehicle like this. And there are design elements that enable that efficiency. So there are big scoops just underneath, or just above, the very confident high-tech lines that scoop air from the front of the car and then push it through underneath the bonnet and then out again to enhance your airflow and your aerodynamic prowess. The wheels—the wheel covers—are designed to be very aerodynamic as well.

I also want to call out something that this vehicle has in terms of charging. The charging setup for this car is very good. You can have pre-conditioning of the battery to improve your more fast charging. You can, according to Lucid, add about 200 miles of range in about 16 minutes if you pre-condition the battery and you are at a compatible high-power DC fast charging station. It’s also got a 19.2-kilowatt onboard charger, which is not far off my F-150 Lightning. That’s impressive.

Yeah, yeah, that is very good. My tiny little charging bugbear is that it exposes the pins on the DC when you open it.

Yes, I’m glad you’re going to say that, because I was just about to go there.

Yeah, if you live in, like, a nice arid dry state, that’s okay. I mean, it’s not optimal because things can still get in there. But if you live in the Pacific Northwest, the downward-sloping opening of that socket, you’re going to get bits of crud stuck in there. You can get water in there. You’re going to get corrosion. And I understand, like, if you’re selling a car at this price point—or indeed at a quarter of a million—then you do not want the little cheapy plastic flappy cover fair. But you need to come up with a solution which isn’t just, oh, well, we’ll let the dirt get in there.

Well, the solution is that they’re switching over to NACS.

Right.

And of course, NACS won’t have that. So I think we can give them a little bit of a pass on that.

But I do want to highlight a feature that this car has. I don’t think any other EV that we’ve reviewed has ever had. And that’s V2V.

Yes. Yes, it does have V2V. And it comes with a special cable that allows you to do two-way power transfer using the Lucid Air’s built-in Wonderbox. That’s what they call their charging system.

It’s called the Wonderbox. Can we maybe go there and persuade them to change the names of some of their things? So it’s not like a socket-based system like we see on some EVs where you can plug in anything. But it does allow you to rescue someone else at a push.

When you join the freeway here, I want to talk about one thing we haven’t mentioned yet, and that’s the cameras. You get a display from the outside of the vehicle showing your blind spot, which is very nice. It doesn’t work when it’s raining as well—not as well. It’s not, you know, zero percent successful, but it’s definitely not optimal. And the cameras are really high up. So the thing that I want to highlight here is that your field of view doesn’t really change between the mirror and what you see on the screen, which is very nice.

All right. I’m going to do it. You’re going to do it. You’re going to talk about the thing that’s been bugging you the entire trip.

OK. Dream Drive with hands-free drive assist. Now, Dream Drive is Lucid’s proprietary name for its Level 2+ semi-autonomous driver assistance feature. It’s hands-off, eyes-up, but… oh, but the first day I drove the vehicle, it didn’t have mapping, I assume, for the road that I was on. I don’t know how much it’s reliant on maps, but it showed a little map symbol and said Dream Drive is not available. So I just had cruise control, adaptive cruise control with some degree of lane-keep assist that was kind of inconsistent.

Second day brought it back. Same problem. Same problem. And then today—pay attention—yeah, it’s very naggy. It’s incredibly naggy during the drive that I had this morning. It was inconsistently available for about a 20- to 30-minute stretch where we would alternate between hands-free driver systems being available. I would enable it. It would then, despite the fact I was looking out the car, say, I can’t see your face. I can’t see your eyes, like I can’t see that you’re looking at the road, and it would flicker between those, which it chimes every time. And that is kind of annoying. And then it would suddenly say, oh, the driver’s system isn’t available. You need to take control. And then a few seconds later, it would say you can only have adaptive cruise control. And then it would cycle back to, hey, why don’t you enable the hands-free driver’s system?

By the end of this sort of half-hour period, I just want to murder someone. I drove up to yours on Sunday, and it was very well-behaved in the rain until I got about two-thirds of the way to your house. And then I stopped to make a coffee, and then it refused to activate.

Yes. So I don’t know what’s going on there, but I can tell you—and I’ve got this cheat sheet—there’s Dream Drive, there’s Dream Drive Premium, and then there’s Dream Drive Pro. I’m not going to go through the whole thing, but effectively, the Dream Drive Pro is the all-singing, all-dancing competitor to Tesla, whatever they’re calling it this week. And then Dream Drive Premium is what now seems to be coming as standard on most of the vehicles. But I think it’s a subscription service again.

At no point during my time driving did I feel that the system was unsafe. There were a couple of situations where it didn’t seem to fully grok what was going on. But my big bug there is that the automated lane change—you can indicate which way you want it to go, and it will overtake depending on which side you want to go. Or it will change lanes depending on which side you want to go. If you are coming up to an off-ramp and you go to indicate to go into the slow lane, it will say, no, no, I can’t do that, because it views that as a dangerous situation. So I’m not entirely sure how and why that decision was made. Obviously, it makes it easier for the system because it doesn’t have to worry about people going off or merging. But you’d hope that that would work.

Well, this is a lovely place to finish our review, Kate.

Yes, yes, delightful. There’s elements of the Scottish Highlands.

Yeah, you’ve got the kind of evergreen trees, you got the nice rolling valleys. It’s pretty. Birds are making noise, and there’s low cloud fog over the valley. And it reminds me of where I grew up in East Anglia in the UK.

But that’s not what we are here to talk about. Does this remind you where you grew up in the UK?

It doesn’t. But it does remind me of a very British car.

Yeah. Which is, you know, no surprise, really, because the founder of Lucid, Peter Rawlinson—no longer the CEO of the company, he’s since moved on—I think he still retains an advisory role at the company, but he cut his teeth at… kind of his resume reads like the who’s who of British automakers.

Right.

So he did. He worked at Jaguar Land Rover. He worked at Lotus. Obviously, he worked at Tesla, was responsible for the design of the Model S. And obviously, this was his baby. He was very proud of it. And, you know, we’ve interviewed Peter a couple of times on the channel talking about this car, and the Lucid Air as Lucid’s first EV was definitely a across-the-bow of Tesla. Yeah. And wanted to offer what Tesla did, without its CEO.

Well, and I think it offers a slightly different take on the same technology, because you can definitely feel that heritage in it. You can feel it in the way that it drives. You can feel it in the way that it looks. But you can also feel that he’s taken what he learned from those experiences. And I think a lot of the decisions about the way the interior works—that speaks to a long time in the industry. And there are elements of both Jaguar and Tesla in the interior of this vehicle. It’s not as tech-focused as a Tesla is.

However, it is very tech-reliant over the air update—software-defined vehicle. That’s the buzz phrase that everybody uses these days. But the choice of interior fabrics just feels more like a Jaguar, like an older British Mark, than it does an American car, which caught me off guard.

Yeah, it definitely surprised me. And I think that feeling—the quality of the materials—is very interesting. I will say that Vai, our DP, did not have many polite things to say about the interior. And I think one of the things that’s really interesting about higher-end vehicles is that the interior finishes are often less durable because they’re not expecting to be put through that. And I think that’s true. But I also think that they do feel good.

So I was looking at the built-in sunshades for the rear seat passengers, and also there’s a power rear shade for the rear window. I have concerns about their lifespan, the way that they are arranged. As I was playing with them, getting them to come up and getting them to go down, I’m like, I can see them sticking and causing problems in the future because they rely on a single rod on those side doors going up. And sometimes I just got the impression that maybe they weren’t tracking quite as nicely as they ought. But I think that is true of any low-volume car.

Yeah. And while Lucid is experiencing a growth in sales, it still has financial backing from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. And there’s a whole load of ethical concerns that many people have about that, that I’m not going to go into right now. Suffice to say, if you have a problem with how Elon Musk is running Tesla, and how Elon Musk is treating the world, you may have a similar set of problems with the investors in Lucid.

Yeah. Yeah. And it’s definitely something that we aren’t going to go into in depth, but we need to mention it.

Yes. But back to the feel of this vehicle, back to the vibe, back to what it brings to the table. And I think the first thing is, it isn’t a Tesla, but it’s as close as damn it to a Tesla for those who want to have that Model S vibe without supporting legacy automakers who may or may not have always been very positive on EVs. And I think that is a niche that a lot of people fit into. I know that there are people who support the channel who have these. I know that there are people who have Lucid Gravity, the SUV, and their primary purchase decision was, I don’t want a Tesla, but I also don’t want to support legacy automakers who may or may not have been very supportive of EVs. And maybe I didn’t want to have the traditional dealer experience model.

So a good cross-shop example for this would be the EQS or maybe the EQE. And Mercedes-Benz lately has kind of backtracked significantly.

Yeah. On EV support.

And of course, you have the Mercedes-Benz tax.

You do.

You do. Although I’m pretty sure you have a Lucid tax as well when it comes to certain things.

But I think that is true. I think that niche exists. It also, I feel, because of the way it has a slightly more traditional-feeling interior, expands that niche further than Tesla could. I think a lot of your more traditional business person who wants the nice car, the executive vehicle, may have felt that the Spartan interior of the Model S really didn’t speak to them. And this—it has enough. It has a lot more of that traditional feel without actually being very traditional. And it has a lot of great onboard features, right?

19.2 kilowatt onboard charger. It’s got the ability to fast charge about 200 miles of range in what, 16 minutes, something like that. It has a super impressive range. It means one of the lowest drag coefficients of any vehicle on sale. And you’ve got these wonderful scoops that drive the air just over the headlights and up and out. The headlights themselves are a technical tour de force—very, very high-end LED-driven headlights that are adaptive. All of the high-tech stuff is there.

But, you know, I keep coming back to this: it is the car that Jaguar could have made in a different universe. If Jaguar had made a different set of decisions about 15 years ago, and instead, where Jaguar is right now is struggling for its life, right, and coming out with concept cars that seem intent on making people feel kind of, oh, what are you doing? But imagine if instead of the I-Pace, Jaguar had come out with this.

Yeah.

Yeah, I can see that future, and it’s a better timeline than the one that we’re in.

Exactly. It’s got all of those features: the aerodynamics, the tech, the hidden wipers. It’s tech without intrusion.

Yeah. And I think, you know, Mercedes-Benz wins when it comes to luxury, when it comes to plush feeling, when it comes to plush vibe. I think Lucid wins when it comes to a car that can sit on the motorway, on the freeway, at 60, 70, or maybe more if you so desire. That’s totally up to you. And be quiet and refined and well-behaved. It has an almost unlimited feel of power if you bury your foot to the floor.

Oh, yeah. It can go quickly in a hurry.

But this is not a tech-bro’s car. It’s not a look-at-me, I’m driving a fancy electric car that can drive itself and park itself—even though it has all of that technology on board.

I know you have thoughts about DreamDrive. We talked about that already.

Yes. Yes. And to be fair, over-the-air updates—these things will improve.

Yeah, we had an over-the-air update while it was parked on my driveway, and the whole process took about two hours, and it did the update, and then it carried on.

But it is a non-objectionable car. I think that’s where I’m coming down to. I mean, it’s a car, and not an SUV. I like cars.

So, yeah, it doesn’t—it’s not offensive in any way. It’s just actually quite understated, and it’s competent. It’s extremely competent. It is competent in what it does. I don’t think it’s a car that eggs you into corners.

If I want, honestly, if I was going to spend this much money on a car, I wouldn’t buy this. If I was going to spend this much money on a car with this much power and this much promise of performance, I would be putting money down on a Porsche Taycan. I would be putting money down on a BMW i4. I would maybe presume an i7, although I haven’t driven an i7. That’s where I would be spending my money, because those cars are designed first and foremost as driver’s cars.

This is designed for a car for everybody inside. But it’s also not a family car. It’s also not aspirational. It’s a car you buy when you’ve arrived. And we’ve arrived.

It’s very pretty up here. I have to tell you that when I grew up, I had a marshland and the little clouds in the distance. We came back home right after getting up at four o’clock in the morning to try and rescue the cows after they got out on the marshes. And I walked into my sister’s bedroom. I was like, Susan, Susan, wake up. The cows got out. And she looked at me and she said, yeah, you’re not getting me. It’s April 1st. And I’m like, wait, did my dad just prank me?

It all brings me back. It takes me home and looks like you want to take me home. So come on. Maybe smoothly. I want to remember that time I once rode in a Rolls-Royce when I was in the car.

Yeah, in the car. Nice and smooth. I want to have a go and have a nice scone on a cup of tea.

Sure. Sure. We’ll find a nice little tearoom on the way home. In Oregon.

In Oregon. Yep. Yep. I’m going to find your tea room. Good grief.

You know, this really is a passenger’s car. I wouldn’t know.