Lucid

Electric vehicles are only getting more popular, and over the past few years a handful of new companies have announced their own EVs. One of the most promising is Lucid.

Lucid was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Newark, California, which is near Tesla's main production facility in Fremont. The automaker currently supplies batteries to the all-electric Formula E racing series, so it certainly has some experience with one of the most difficult aspects of building an electric vehicle.

Its first vehicle is the Air, an all-electric luxury sedan. Lucid revealed the Air in September 2020 and says deliveries will start in spring 2021. It's built at the company's factory in Casa Grande, Arizona.

Lucid is following Tesla's sales model and selling cars directly to customers rather than through traditional dealerships. Showrooms and service centers will initially open in California, Florida, New York and Virginia.

The Lucid Air's specs are impressive. Lucid puts the range of the top-line Air Dream Edition at 517 miles when equipped with the 113-kWh battery pack. Using a 350-kW DC fast charger, the Air is capable of charging to 300 miles of range in 20 minutes.

That battery capacity isn't just good for range. Lucid says the Air Dream Edition will make up to 1,080 horsepower and can sprint to 60 mph in just 2.5 seconds and blast past the quarter-mile in 9.9 seconds. If true, that would make the Air one of the quickest and most powerful cars on the planet.

The Air will come standard with a full suite of advanced driving aids that Lucid calls DreamDrive. It includes such features as adaptive cruise control, lane centering and automatic parking. These are all par for the course for luxury vehicles currently, but Lucid is also equipping the Air with future-proofing hardware. Lucid says future over-the-air updates will enhance the Air with more automated driving capability.

Over the next few years, Lucid plans to release Air models with less range but at lower price points. The most affordable will be the base Lucid Air that should have a price of less than $80,000. It's scheduled to come out in 2022.

It's fair to be skeptical of an all-new company looking to enter the highly competitive and complicated world of automobile production. Yet the people running Lucid are far from inexperienced. Many of them have worked at other companies such as Tesla, General Motors and Mazda. Of all the EV-only brands so far, only Tesla has achieved any meaningful sales success. Lucid may just be the next one to follow.