The New Lucid Air Has A 508 Mile Range. Is That Worth It, Or A Giant Splurge?

Luxury Electric Vehicle maker Lucid announced that their new Lucid Air Dream edition will feature a 113kwh battery, good for 520 miles of EPA range, closer to 508 in real life. That’s a huge range in contrast to the 353 miles of the long range Tesla

TSLA
Model 3, and still a bunch more than the 415 mile long range model S and all other vehicles.

This range comes at a price. The Dream comes at a $169,000 price though the Touring edition, with almost the same range is “just” $139,000. Other versions with less range are much less costly, and not all of this extra money is for the battery, of course.

But still, does a 500 mile range matter? Is it overkill or would you want even more, if you could afford it, and your car had the room for it? It’s almost surely major overkill for a car to drive around cities, but it could have value on road trips into remote areas. People overestimate the need for range in their EVs, and before you buy one, you often fear “range anxiety” which actually turns out to be a minor problem. But some people definitely want this.

Aside from money, all this battery comes with another cost — it adds a fair bit of weight to the car. That weight actually means you get less range than you would from the battery, but it gives you great cornering ability since it’s on the bottom of the vehicle.

Around the city

This range is nuts around the city. Anybody who can afford this car almost surely owns their own parking spot, where they can have charging. If you have charging at home, you don’t need more than enough range for a few days of driving. The average car drives under 40 miles/day. You could get by for 10 days without charging a car like this in the city unless you have a long commute. That’s why owners of cars with more than 200 miles of range find they never use any charging other than their home or office charger. No parking lot or store chargers, no fast chargers — just the home or office.

There are a few rich folks who can’t have charging at their home or office. For them, this much range would let you live a more gasoline like existence — drive around town for almost 2 weeks, then find a fast charger to “fill up.” You would have to do it for less often with a range like this. But really, you are buying a $170,000 car and don’t have parking for it?

Counter to the intuition of most people, the bigger the battery pack, the less power you need for your home charger. While a 100 mile range leaf absolutely needs to fill every night and even at work, a 500 mile car can easily go several days without filling. Even “Level 1” charging from an ordinary household plug, that will only add 5 miles of range to the Lucid Air per hour, will add 50-70 miles per night. Because people only average 40 miles/day, a 500 mile battery can happily drive more than that some days, and less others, and average it out. Sure, it would take forever to recharge the car from 0 to full, but you never do that at home. That’s only for road trips.

On ordinary road trips

On a typical road trip, following reasonably major roads, this is again probably too much range. 500 miles is well over 7 hours of solar driving at freeway speeds, and most people don’t do that in a day unless they are trying to get somewhere far away as fast as possible — in which case they usually fly. You stop to pee and eat and it’s not hard on major roads to do that where there is charging. In fact, for people taking it slow, this much range could make one difference — you might only charge every other day. You could be more flexible about when and where you charge, which is a nice perk.

One real advantage of 500 miles of range is that fast charging is only super fast when your battery is less than 50% “full.” In addition, you don’t like to take it much below 20% or over 90% if you’re being nice to it. With this range, that zone from 20 to 50% contains 150 miles. The actual shortest-time charging strategy is to drive down to 20%, then recharge only to 50-60%, because charging gets slow at that point. They advertise this car can charge at 350kw — a whopping 1200 miles of range per hour of charging, but in reality you can only do this for a short time, less than 10 minutes, and then it slows down. As such, this car could drive for 200 miles (3 hours) then stop for a 10 minute pee break and continue on, and you will spend the least time charging (as long as the charging stations aren’t too far out of your way.) Other cars can do this too, but they can’t travel 150 miles between 20% and 50% like the Lucid Air. But they can get pretty close.

It’s worth noting that you usually want an eating break 2-3 times/day if you are driving this way. 10 minute is far too short a time for a meal. In fact 30 minutes is too short, and every time I have anything but a counter-service or food truck meal in a Tesla that takes 40 minutes to charge, I have to interrupt the meal to go move the car. I would actually prefer the charging be slower. Often your restaurant is a 5 minute or more walk from the charger, and so moving the car is no minor thing.

As such, this much range does open some new options on that heavy driving day, but not as many as you might think.

It should also be noted that the CCS charging network used by the Lucid Air is not nearly up to the capability of Tesla’s supercharging network. The VW Dieselgate scandal has funded many stations through Electrify America, many of them at high charge rates, and the stations at present get light use because there are far more Teslas out there. CCS stations are now in more places, but with fewer chargers per station — sometimes just 1 or 2, and often just at 50kw in rural locations. And worse, often broken. This will improve with time. With CHAdeMO defeated, CCS seems primed to grow, and adapters to allow CCS and Tesla cars to use each other’s stations may also arise.

Overnight stops

The best place to charge is at your hotel, and more and more hotels come equipped with Level 2 chargers that provide 6-7kw. While the Lucid Air has a heavy duty on-board charger that can charge at a whopping 19kw, it’s very rare to see that in a hotel charger. (Sometimes the Tesla Destination chargers Tesla gives to hotels can get that high in higher end Teslas.) At the more common 6kw, you can’t take the Lucid Air from 20% to 90% in a 10 hour overnight stay, though you can add a respectable 250 to 300 miles of range to it.)

You might need to do some fast charging stops on top of your hotel stops. They are stll worth it, but their value is capped at adding about 300 miles in most cases. This may change in the future, and some hotels can do more.

Towing

People like trailers, but towing one with an electric car is not very practical. It will easily eat up half the range. But with a 500 mile battery, that can still be a respectable 250 miles of range. Lucid has not spoken about the towing capacity of the Air but it could be practical. Charging sessions will still be long, if you need to load up 100kwh.

Electric cars in the future will probably tow electric trailers, with their own batteries and lower-end motors. Such trailers will be able to assist the car in pulling them up hills, and not eat as much into the tow vehicle’s range. They’ll have a lot of other advantages too, with electric appliances, solar panels and more. You could tow one with a bicycle, if it were not for safety issues. They will even be smart and make it easy to back up connected to one or move around by hand when disconnected. An RV park, even at 50a, would not have enough power to recharge an electric trailer and an electric car in a 10 hour overnight, though.

Off the beaten path

The bigger value of this much range will come from trips deep into the back roads, hundreds of miles from the nearest fast chargers. Today, such areas exist in the most rural locations, and certainly in lots of Canada. Even 500 miles would not let you drive the Alaska highway or much around Alaska without overnight stops at the few motels with charging. In time this will chage, but this much range would allow driving these areas with much less concern or planning. In a <250 mile range like a Tesla 3 SR+ it can be done but requires effort and planning. So the extra battery buys you that convenience, and even opens up some areas that are very difficult — at least for now. With $billions on offer for charging, the gaps won’t last very long. In rural areas, CCS stations are small, and only 50kw if they exist at all. A true fill-up would easily take over 2 hours at these.

I recently completed a 5,000 mile road trip including lots of rural British Columbia in a Tesla whose battery is down to 230 miles of range. It took some effort, but it pulled it off. The 500 mile battery would have removed the effort, reduced anxiety and added options in a few places. But the smaller battery pulled it off. In most cases, the bigger battery would be a nice luxury, not a must-have. But in some places it would be a must.

Of course, for all EV drivers, there is a solution to this problem, which is a gasoline or hybrid rental car. The reality is that such a rental car is going to be much cheaper than buying a 500 mile battery pack and carrying it around the city for years where you don’t need it. From an economic standpoint, the rental car is the right choice. In the future, it might even be a rental electric car with a big battery.

Lucid Air owners (and even Tesla owners) don’t like that solution much, even though it’s cheaper and more practical. You don’t want a fancy luxury car like the Lucid Air just to give it up on your road trips, even if you only do one road trip a year. Though there may be call for a non-sedan, with high clearance and ability to do dirt roads and off-roading better than your luxury sedan. Some day you will also be able to rent an amazing electric 4×4 for that as well.

So is a 500 mile battery cost effective? It isn’t. It adds value but at a high cost. But people who purchase a $169,000 Lucid Air Dream aren’t looking for the most cost effective solution. The modest increase in flexibility on road trips may be worth it to such buyers.