A new electric auto that has barely strike the street was just rated the ideal car of 2022 by MotorTrend. The winner of the magazine’s “2022 Auto of the Year†award, a hugely coveted recognition in the car market, is Lucid Air, made by Silicon Valley startup Lucid Motors.
The past electric powered vehicle to win this award was Tesla’s Design S in 2013.
MotorTrend ranks automobiles according to 6 essential requirements: layout improvement, engineering excellence, efficiency, efficiency of meant perform, safety and price. Although knowledge on the very last two metrics are lacking for new cars, Lucid Air scored so large in the other 4 categories that it edged out 6 other finalists, together with the Mercedes-Benz EQS and Porsche Taycan.
The first Lucid Air Aspiration and Grand Touring models will deliver 451-520 miles of array from a battery potential of just 118kWh and 112 kWh, respectively. “Lucid is squeezing a outstanding quantity of miles from every single kilowatt-hour in this S-Class-competitive luxurious sedan,†MotorTrend editors wrote on Monday.
The journal also highlighted Lucid Air’s large effectiveness, calculated by miles for each gallon of gasoline-equal (mpg-e) for electric powered cars. The Air has EPA scores that assortment from 111-131 mpg-e, bigger than similar products this sort of as Tesla Model S (96-120 mpg-e), Audi E-tron GT and Porsche Taycan (70-79 mpg-e). The Mercedes EQS is not but rated.
Lucid Motors went general public on Nasdaq in July by a SPAC merger and raised $4.5 billion in fresh new funds. The company originally wished to get started providing the Air in 2018, but production was delayed because of to a hard cash squeeze. It shipped out the first Air, a start model identified as Aspiration Edition, just two months ago, on Oct 30.
The Desire Edition, starting at $169,000 before incentives, is the large-stop model of the Air. The far more affordable Air Grand Touring, beginning at $139,000, will begin rollout up coming yr, adopted by an even fewer high priced model known as Air Pure, which starts off at $77,400.
Under is a table evaluating specs of unique Air styles compiled by InsideEVs.
Acknowledging that Lucid Air is a new car or truck, MotorTrend explained it “did not immediately get all of our hearts.â€
“Many judges expressed dire concern that if Lucid fails to rectify the many wonky quirks our prototype suffered, the model and car or truck could go down in historical past as a 21st century Tucker or Chevy Vega,†wrote the editors. “Some more mature judges assuaged these fears by highlighting the a lot of similarities between this auto and company and the Tesla we awarded in 2013.â€
