"This summer, I'll drive it to my family's ancestral home in the rural upper midwest and back. If I can't do it in roughly the same time it would take in a gas powered car, I'll bring you all beer," I said. On the other hand, if I could, they agreed to get me a full selection of Belgian monastery ales as penance for their unbelief.
Long story short; they had better get beer shopping. I made the roughly 1,200 mile one-way trip in two days there and two days back (with a couple of weeks of visiting friends and family in between). Along the way, I never had to wait to charge, I never ran into a faulty charger (though I did get a slow one once) and I enjoyed a very quiet, comfortable drive along I-76, I-90, I-94, and a bunch of smaller, more rural roads. I averaged a bit under 60 miles per hour (57.1) with all stops and construction. I drove 800 miles in 14 hours on two of those four travel days - better than I would have done in our gas powered car.
I used Electrify America's network exclusively, and generally would charge for three half-hour sessions each driving day. That would get my 2025 Air Pure from 10-80 percent give or take. I would then drive between 200-250 miles between charging stops. I was often stopping at Walmarts, or as I got closer to the East Coast, Sheetz stations. While I had theoretically hoped to go closer to 300 miles between charging stops, I found that in practice I was ready to stop between 200-250 anyway.
To get around this, I would either just navigate to my next personally chosen charging stop (rather than let it plan the whole trip out), or, after a while just use Apple Maps via CarPlay so it wasn't freaking out just because I was happy to let the battery get down to 7-8 percent before charging if I could. I would love for Lucid to let you select charging networks that you want it to route you on a longer trip. It will let you search for just Electrify America stations, for instance. But when it route plans, it chooses whatever is closest to maintaining it's internal goal of having you pull up with about 25-30 percent of charge. Wouldn't it be great if we could not only select our preferred charging network(s) in the navigation system, but also our target amount of charge remaining when we pull into the next charger? I'd be quite happy setting it to 7-10 percent.
My total efficiency wasn't as good as I hoped, but not bad either - 4.06 for the entire trip. I have the 19 inch wheels but removed the aero covers (they look so much better that way!). That gave me a real road maximum highway range between 320-340. I drove anywhere between 70-80 mph most of the time.
I saw one other Lucid on my entire drive. They are very rare cars as you get into the upper midwest. It sparked a number of conversations, and more than one loud muscle car attempting to compensate for something as they drove by (I only took the bait a couple of times).
Now to tell those loser friends of mine that they owe me beer!
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