Review: The Queen Of EVs Is Still Very Much The Lucid Air

I was expecting the 2025 Lucid Air Touring to be a great electric vehicle (EV), but I wasn’t expecting it to be such a great luxury sedan. In recent years, some legacy luxury carmakers have been banking hard on their splashy nameplates to sell us what turned out to be underwhelming products. Mercedes-Benz, particularly, has been known for shoving low-rent plastics inside models priced in the six-digit realm. And although the Volvo EX90 wants to take on the German big three in the world of large electric SUVs, its well-documented smorgasbord of software and hardware glitches challenges its hefty price tag.

But with the Air, a car built by a carmaker that essentially wasn’t building cars a decade ago, no stone seems to have been left unturned. After spending a few days with it, basking in its near-obsessive craftsmanship and attention to detail, I had completely forgotten that this was an EV. By any measure, the Lucid Air is a fantastic luxury item.

2025 Lucid Air Touring First Impressions: Sleek, Good-Looking And Distinctive

Wherever I went with the Lucid Air, it attracted stares and comments from people who either knew what it was, or were genuinely curious about a car they’d never seen before. This is a striking sedan not necessarily because it checks off the traditional sexy car design boxes, but because the Air looks like nothing else on the road.

It’s low to the ground, wide and long, but also sleek through careful aerodynamic massaging to achieve a low drag coefficient of 0.21 Cd. This is, simply put, the most aerodynamic car currently on sale. But there are some neat design elements, too, like the distinctive blade-like chrome beak which, although I’m not a fan of, definitely gives the car road presence. My favorite design feature remains its roof, the way it sits on the car’s body like a cap. A subtle chrome element towards the rear of that cap, on which Lucid stamped the Air name, adds substance. Actually, from some angles, this car reminds me of an old Citroën DS.

It’s a shame my test unit was wearing the optional, 19-inch winter wheel package (actually called Aero Range), because when wearing its usual 20-inch sets (called Aero Light or Aero Blade), the Air’s styling is hyper-coherent. But I wouldn’t change anything about the way this car looks, except for perhaps slightly increasing the size of the lower front air intake for added effect.

2025 Lucid Air Touring Exterior Dimensions

2025 Lucid Air Touring: Differences Between The U.S. And Canadian Market

Since Lucid is a relatively new carmaker, with currently only two models to sell (the Gravity SUV is new to the lineup), Lucid effectively sells the Air the same way on both sides of the border. Like Tesla, it’s a corporate selling method, meaning Lucid sells its cars not through a franchised dealership network, but rather a series of Lucid-owned “studios”.

Prices are therefore the same across each respective market. There’s no haggling, and buyers can order their car either through a Lucid representative, or from the Lucid website. Cars can then be either delivered to the studio or at an address of your choosing. As I write this, the Air is available in the U.S. and Canada in four distinct trim levels: Pure, Touring (as tested) Grand Touring, and Sapphire.

U.S. Versus Canada Lineup Breakdown And Starting MSRP (model tested in bold)

Driving Impressions And Performance: Fast, Smooth, Quiet, With Plenty Of EV Range

It’s obvious the moment you start driving the 2025 Lucid Air Touring that it comes from a company that has extensive experience developing and tuning electric drive units for Formula E. There’s a sense of fluidity, coherence, efficiency and overachieving performance in the way this car drives. And it doesn’t feel like an amateur job, nor a beginner’s luck sort of deal. The Air’s chassis was tuned by people who know how a large luxury sedan is supposed to drive. I’ve driven Bentleys that didn’t drive this well.

Underneath the Air Touring’s sleek body sits a 92-kWh liquid-cooled lithium-ion battery powering two permanent-magnet AC motors. Together, they’re good for a total combined output of 620 horsepower and 885 lb-ft of torque. Launch the Air Touring from a standstill, and it’ll hit 60 MPH in a blistering 3.6 seconds. But the numbers don’t tell the full story as the Air releases its performance in a series of different sequences, creating a sense of drama in the process.

Since my time with it was spent in cold weather and on winter tires, I couldn’t unleash the Air Touring’s full acceleration potential, but once it finds a solution to grip all fours to the tarmac, it launches hard and increases the strength of that velocity as speeds climb. This gives the Air Touring more character, feeling almost like a gasoline-powered full-size limousine as it glides forward with haste. Oh, and in case you’re wondering which one to get in the lineup, I say this Touring is the sweet spot, as it offers a lovely blend of performance, luxury, and efficiency at a somewhat decent price point.

Going fast in a straight line is something all EVs do well. Where they tend to fall short is in their consistently stiff damping due to the excessive weight they need to carry around. Yet, even in that regard, the Air is a master at providing a cloud-like ride experience, absorbing road imperfections with minimal vibrations and harshness. But it will also play along on a winding back road, providing the sort of feedback and engagement sports sedans are liked for. It’s the kind of suspension tuning I expect from a BMW, not from an upstart automaker that has never built cars before.

2025 Lucid Air Touring Technical Specifications

2025 Lucid Air Touring Energy Consumption, Range, And Charging

In optimal conditions, the EPA rates the range of a Lucid Air Touring with 19-inch wheels at 425 miles (683 km). As for charging, Lucid says the Air will fast-charge on a DC fast-charging unit at a rate of 250 kW, again, in optimal conditions. The onboard charger for level 2 home charging is rated by the automaker at 19.2 kW, a high number in the current EV industry.

As for me, the car got me 217 real-world miles while driving it in the cold, and at mostly highway speeds, consuming, on average, 2.9 miles per kWh. In such conditions, that’s a fantastic energy consumption average.

However, where the Air didn’t perform so well was during a fast-charging session on a 180-kW fast charger. While I perform most of my EV charging at home on my Flo G5 7.2 kW level 2 charger, I gave the Air at least one shot at a DC fast-charger to see how it fares. Luckily, the car allows you to manually precondition its battery beforehand, to optimize charging performance. Which I did. Sadly, as you can see in the graph above, during the 20-minute charging session, my preconditioned Air only managed to peak at just over 150 kW. It then quickly dropped to as low as 109 kW.

EPA And As Tested Energy Consumption And Range

Interior Design And Comfort: Everything A Luxury Sedan Should Be, Except One Minor Detail

Again, the moment you sit inside a Lucid Air, you get a sense that you’re inside something expensive and rather exclusive. My tester’s contrasting Tahoe leather on black upholstery looked rich, young, and also trendy. All cabin materials also look and feel like they’ve been cherry-picked to offer a truly high-end, yet minimalistic luxury experience. The cabin’s generally spacious and airy feeling, mostly due to the lack of mechanical components underneath the car, adds a sense of grandeur only the best full-size luxury limousines know how to offer.

Also, hats off to Lucid for preserving physical buttons and knobs for vital functions such as climate control settings and audio volume. I’ll get back to this car’s technology in a bit, but the fact that Lucid presents it in a clean, restrained manner is refreshing in this world of screen-infested cabins.

It’s a brilliant interior, one that immediately puts you at ease from how it wraps around you with ergonomic excellence. But it’s not perfect. The Air’s aggressively sloped A pillar and low roof means that if you’re tall, you’ll need to make sure the driver’s seat is already lowered to its max setting before climbing inside.

The rear seats are immensely comfortable, offering more legroom than you could ever imagine, including convenience features such as retractable curtains, all operated via the center-mounted screen. The rear doors also open wide, all the way to the B pillar for easy ingress and egress. It’s all very inviting, unless you’ve got young children to carry around. That seat’s backrest is positioned behind the C pillar in such a way that strapping my son in a rear-facing child’s seat proved ergonomically challenging.

Finally, although the Lucid app operates rather seamlessly, the car didn’t always unlock automatically as I approached it. Neither did it unlock when I came close to it with the key fob. This inconsistency eventually had me just manually locking/unlocking the doors using the fob itself.

2025 Lucid Air Touring Interior Dimensions

Technology And Ease Of Use: Quiet And Brilliantly Executed, But Where’s Android Auto?

Perhaps where the Lucid Air stands taller than other EVs, and any other new vehicle for that matter, is how it masters its technology to the point that you don’t really realize it’s there. Yes, the Air’s entire dashboard is essentially a large tablet display. And there’s even a second, vertical tablet underneath the main one, which can all appear overwhelming at first.

But I quickly got my head around everything due to how smoothly it all operates, and how easy it is to grasp. More importantly, the tech is all presented in a laid-back way, with dark backlighting to appease its intensity, but to also fit better with the car’s interior materials. Once I was done configuring the car’s climate control settings and drive modes, I’d tuck that second screen away, which was particularly handy at night. It felt great to finally be driving a new car that wasn’t blasting LED screens at me past sunset. It’s one of the best integrations of modern technology I’ve ever seen in a modern automobile.

There are really only two downfalls to the Air’s tech. The first being the lack of a heads-up display. Considering my car had a nearly $100,000 ($125,000 CAD) price tag, it felt somewhat unacceptable. So did the absence of Android Auto. And, I’m not talking about wireless Android Auto, but Android Auto altogether! To its defense, Lucid says an update is coming soon to fix this.

Cargo And Storage Space: There’s A Lot Of It

Thanks to the Air’s generous use of both its front and rear storage areas, it’s up there among one of the most practical sedans currently on sale. Unfortunately, it still can’t match the Tesla Model S (25 cu-ft), which is a hatchback, yielding more cargo space once those rear seats are lowered flat (61.4 cu-ft). However, the Model S’ front trunk (frunk) is less spacious (3.1 cu-ft) than the Air’s. So, when all seats are in place, the Lucid Air actually offers more total cargo space.

2025 Lucid Air Touring Cargo Space

Looking Forward To What’s Coming Next At Lucid

Of course, me telling you that the Lucid Air is both a fantastic luxury sedan and a great electric vehicle comes as no surprise. Lucid has already won the North American Luxury Car Award with it, to say nothing of all the praise other automotive media outlets have given the car. Yes, it’s that good. But Lucid now needs to move on to other things. More lucrative things.

Moving forward, it’s the Gravity SUV that’ll do most of the heavy lifting as the company ramps up production and prepares for more affordable models through its Mid-Size program. Indeed, the stakes are high, especially in this economy, but based on this review alone, I’m confident that Lucid will push through. Until it gets there, the Air remains the undisputed queen of the EV world.