Lucid has spent years on the second EV, a luxurious van-like SUV designed to be a category killer that can gain market share from other luxury EVs and internal combustion engine people’s carriers, such as the Libian R1, Cadillac Escalade IQ, BMW X7, Audi Q8, etc.
The purpose of the Saudi Arabian company was to create an SUV without compromise. After its first drive on the EV with a starting price of $96,550, the company isn’t just focusing on the luxurious touch. There are many though.
Clear gravity may just be over-engineering at its best. The EV comes with high tech and upgrades from its predecessor, the Lucid Air Sedan. Peter Rawlinson, CEO and CTO of Former Meid, who came aside in February, may no longer be in the company, but his engineering fingerprints are in a new, clear gravity.
And while customers may not see the technology under the proverb hood, they will experience it.
Clear gravity is EPA rated range up to 450 miles, 0-60 mph time under 3.5 seconds, and unprecedented charging times for current EVs. According to the company, gravity can charge up to 200 miles in just 11 minutes with DC fast charging. This is thanks to the new boost mode, which utilizes the rear motor as a transformer to boost charging.
This luxury, technology and breadth are all priced. The vehicle’s price tag ranges from $96,550 for the two-row Grand Touring trim, with $99,450 for the three-row version. A $81,550 touring model is expected to arrive later this year.
Lucid Gravity’s Technical Courage
The engineers working on gravity took what they learned from Lucid Air Sapphire and Lucid Air to create the new Gen 2 system for the company that supports the SUV. This includes Panasonic (which, according to Lucid, offers a 40% improvement in charging speeds over the competing set), a new drive unit, a new heat system, and a new battery developed in collaboration with the new charging system.
Specifically, the engineers have created a system that allows chargers to charge 225 kW with a 500 volt architecture (which supports Tesla’s V3 charger).
To do this, the engineers used gravity motors and inverters as transformers to enhance the 500 volt charging to the required voltage of the battery without adding additional hardware. They also implemented plug-and-charge on the system so that owners don’t have to make a fuss about paying or starting billing on certain chargers.
EV charging innovation
The change is part of Tesla’s North American charging standards announced last year. The standard presentation was made when the development of gravity was almost complete.
When around 70% developed between late 2022 and early 2023, the foundation of gravity had to be significantly rethinked. According to Emad Dlala, Senior Vice President of Powertrain at Lucid.
“When I joined in 2015, 400 Volts was cutting edge,” Dorara said. “At a moment, we realised we needed to take it to the next level,” he continued.
The team behind Gravity also made many hardware changes, added redundancy, supported the infotainment system, and ultimately added automated driving capabilities to advanced driver assistance systems.
The company uses NVIDIA’s ORIN-X processors for AI recognition, and advanced driver assistance systems use the Infineon TC397 for video processing, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8295 infotainment, and vehicle dynamics and body control.
Today, gravity offers what is called level 2 autonomous driving. This is a system that automates some of the driving, but you still need to pay attention to the driver. Lucid aims to ultimately offer Level 3 or L3. This usually provides handoff and eye-off driving on the highway under certain conditions.
According to the company, the Dream Drive 2 Pro, an upgrade to ADAS, is optimally planned and offers features like up to five lanes of traffic, curve speed control, lane change assistance, curb rash alerts and automatic parking visualization.
Clear gravity: cargo and passenger space
Gravity is designed to be spacious for residents and their cargo. The engineers and designers achieved that goal. The interior is overseas on the inside, with a whopping 120 cubic feet of interior space. That’s 40% more than its closest competitor, Lucid says.
It turns out that efforts to avoid the fuse helped them get there.
Don’t use fuses as the company needs to be accessed and replaced regularly, according to Jean-Philippe Gauthier, head of software engineering at Lucid.
Instead, Lucid decided to use a diffuser with gravity, which is essentially an electronic switch. These diffusers automatically reset when the car is circulating, respond quickly to shorts in the system, eliminating errors that could cause fuses to be installed with the wrong amps during replacement, allowing you to fill the fuse box deeper inside the vehicle instead of intruding into the interior space. The diffuser also provides unnecessary system power and reduces parasitic losses to the vehicle.
To prove that gravity is wider than its competitors, the EV maker lined up the Cadillac Escalade IQ, Mercedes-Benz EQS SUV, Libian R1S and BMW X7 at hand at an event in Los Olivos, California. Reporters were challenged to take boxes filled with gravity (including spacious Franks) and stack them on an EQS SUV.
It was an impossible task and no other close competitors were on hand. A fellow journalist who happens to be 6 feet, 6 inches, lay comfortably in the rear of gravity, allowing him to close the rear hatch without any problems.
Clear gravity on the road
It has a large gravity, 198.2 inches long and 87.2 inches wide. This will make the EV SUV slightly below the size of the Chevrolet suburbs. Still, the vehicle is huge and helps to enhance interior space.
A full-size SUV with such a footprint usually tends to be booming inside, with huge lorry pollies on the roads, making it uncomfortable, especially on winding roads.
That’s not the case with clear gravity.
I drove gravity from Nipomo, California along the central coast along the Kuyama Highway and the Tepsuke road, a steep, one-lane, sharp, winding road.
The gravity is heavy (over 6,000 pounds for the 3 row option I drove). I felt some of its weight on the road. However, placing the vehicle in a comfortable setting called “smooth” made it easy to handle highway cruising and wide sweepers.
I switched it to Swift for Tepsuke’s path, and the adaptive dampers and air springs ate rough twitches and curves without making the vehicle uneasy or nauseous at any point. That winding road in a quick environment was so smooth that the passengers fell asleep.
Gravity gets rear wheel steering when equipped with a dynamic package (adds about $2900 to the base price). This allows you to add a rear wheel steering that moves faster (or slower) faster (or slower) in both phases.
Wheel maneuvering then increases the agility of the vehicle and reduces roads when driving on single-lane mountain roads or dirt trucks.
Even as I pierced (and slid) through the dirt, the gravity remained very flat and comfortable. And yes, it can do very light off-roading with gravity and get 7 inches of ground clearance.
One of the most amazing things I liked about gravity was the so-called “four-legged” steering wheel. After driving other vehicles in the (silly) yoke, the square wheels feel even more agile and responsive gravity, with the electric auxiliary rack and pinion steering being adjusted to be absolutely spotted.
Lucid also adjusted one pedal drive to be very intuitive, so there was no need to touch the brakes on the winding roads around Los Olivos.
After more than four years of development, it is clear that a seven-seater all-electric SUV offers incredible range, efficiency, agility and functionality to wealthy buyers looking for a “made in America” vehicle that is not Tesla.
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