I think these two posts taken together very aptly describe the situation Lucid is up against and what they have to try to do to address it.
Can you imagine what Lucid drivetrain and chassis engineers and Derek Jenkins and his design team must think of all this "it's a minivan" talk?
They have built a vehicle with almost three times the power of the most powerful minivan and almost 100 horsepower more than the most powerful SUV (the BMW XM).
They have built a vehicle that even Jason Cammisa says can render the sports car category obsolete in terms of road dynamics.
They have built a vehicle with more passenger room than a Chevy Suburban, GM's largest SUV, and packed it into a vehicle shorter than an Explorer, the smallest of Ford's triad of full-size SUVs.
They forewent the very convenience feature that almost universally defines a minivan: sliding rear doors.
They have targeted the vehicle category with the largest U.S. market -- the SUV . . . but they have wound up with a crescendo of claims that it has landed in the smallest vehicle category in the U.S. market -- the minivan.
Why? Because of the tendency of people to latch onto a single trait or two that catches their attention and, on that basis, consign an entire complex thing into the simplest familiar slot that comes to mind.
Let's took at the term "SUV".
First comes
"Sport".
The "S" stands for sport. But I don't really know what "sport" means for most conventional SUVs. They often handle like pigs, so it's not about the sport of driving. Except for a very few (Rivian, some Range Rovers, the Mercedes G class), most never see heavy off-road duty, so they're not all that much about the sport of outdoor adventure. What they are often used for is hauling a bunch kids to events and places, but that's not actually a sport. Ironically, the vehicle best suited for the kids is a minivan, which is why they became associated with the term "soccer moms".
In fact, if you consider the sport of driving, the Gravity is one of the "sportiest" vehicles of the SUV category.
Next comes
"Utility".
With a cargo capacity exceeded only by the behemoths of the GM Suburban class and the Ford Excursion class, it is clearly a utility vehicle.
Finally comes
"Vehicle".
I think everyone can agree that the Gravity is a vehicle.
Yet where are we? Amidst a growing cacophony of claims here and elsewhere that the Gravity is not an SUV, but a minivan.
As
@AirQuality says, the situation Lucid is up against is very much like what Apple was up against with its early groundbreaking products. I can only hope the posts on this forum -- which often get picked up in wider social media -- assist with Lucid's task instead of hinder it.
electrek.co
