Lucid Production Week Event

hmp10

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Posts about this week's production preview event in Casa Grande are showing up on threads about other topics, so I thought I'd start a thread specific to the event so that we can more easily find posts relating to the event.

One of the forum members, Ashoka8350, was at the event, and his post about it should not be missed. Maybe he wouldn't mind reposting it here so that new visitors don't miss it?

Yesterday we got video reviews of the test drives from three established YouTube channels: "The Kilowatts", "Two Bit Da Vinci", and "Out of Spec Motoring". I thought that signaled the lifting of the press embargo that would quickly be followed by other reviews. We're now two days after the event, and reports of actual test drives from the press remain scarce, although some, such as "Transport Evolved" hinted last week they already has something ready to go once the embargo lifted. The print reviews are equally scarce. The only one detailing a test drive so far is from "Mashable". (If I've missed something, someone please help me.)

Where are the big boys and girls? "Car & Driver", "Edmunds", "Kelly Blue Book", "Road & Track", "Bloomberg", "Forbes Automotive", etc.?
 
Hmp10, how did you feel about their opinion of the car? I didn’t feel they felt strongly one way or the other.

A quote like this, “the Air felt relatively composed and comfortable”, made me feel they weren’t head over heels with it. Maybe I’m reading more into it than warrants.
 
"Edmunds" typically goes out of its way to report its observations in a matter-of-fact manner, avoiding all tendency toward hyperbole. For that reason, they are among my favorite car reviewers to whose website I have gone over the years when I start considering a car. Actually, their headline saying "color us impressed" was, by their writing standards, a strong endorsement.

This linked article was just an abridged version of what is going to be a more comprehensive review of the car once they're given a chance to drive one for more than 15 minutes on unchallenging roads. I'm anxiously awaiting it.

I think they're absolutely right that the Air will feel little different from other high-end EVs in terms of power and acceleration, as once you get into a class of cars that includes the Taycan and Tesla Plaid, you're driving a car with more power than can really be used on public roads. It takes a racetrack and controlled testing to flush out the differences at the extremes of their power delivery, and "Edmunds" tends to live in the world of public roads and non-professional drivers.

"Edmunds" did say, "the Air feels much more like a car from a company like Mercedes or Porsche than it does a Tesla." This is actually high praise from them, especially regarding the first product from a new automaker. And "Edmunds" was quite right to point out that the Lucid rear seat with the larger battery pack is not as roomy as the rear seat of a large MB or BMW. It is not, despite all the hype from others about the vast room in the back.

Back to the headline, when "Edmunds" says "color us impressed", it has real meaning.
 
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Where are the big boys and girls? "Car & Driver", "Edmunds", "Kelly Blue Book", "Road & Track", "Bloomberg", "Forbes Automotive", etc.?
The event is suppose to be all week long even though the main activities were Tuesday. I am hoping that we see some longer drives and more production details at the end of the week.
 
This one states 88kWhr and 18 modules for the Air Touring and Air Pure. This is the first time I have seen these numbers published. I would like to see these numbers directly from Lucid though.

I was told at a Lucid Design Studio that the larger battery pack had 22 modules and the smaller 18 modules. (This would make sense, as the smaller pack removes 4 modules from under the rear floorboard.) However, I wasn't given the kWh rating of the smaller pack. 18/22 would come out to about 92kWh, so 88kWh doesn't sound far-fetched.
 

Thie one had quite a bit of information I have not seen before:

- Customer deliveries to start October 12 (Wonder where he got that?)
- Design showrooms empty, waiting for customer cars (Why? Surely cars aren't going to be delivered off showroom floors?)
- Car weighs 5200 pounds (I've heard 5,050 with the larger battery pack.)
- Jade fabric selection (Say what?)
 
Here's another review:


This one says the car weighs 5600 pounds, which I don't believe. It also says they drove a Dream R. I don't know whether that is true, as every other reviewer from Tuesday said they were driving the Performance version.

This review, while never mentioning tire noise, said the car was so "boomy" inside due to the glass canopy that rear seat passengers had to lean forward to hear passengers in the front seat. That's odd, as when Kyle Conner drove a car that he said had noticeable tire noise, he frequently addressed back seat passengers who responded with no one having to lean forward or raise their voices.

Also, Kyle Conner commented on how well the DreamDrive held lane position without the wandering he's seen in other cars. This review said the car "ping ponged" when trying to stay in wider lanes.

It seems Lucid is going to be no more immune from wildly conflicting takes by different reviewers on identical aspects of the car than any other carmaker.
 
I don’t understand the wide array of opinions from these reviewers when it comes to noise. I can’t imagine that car to car variations is the causative factor.
 
I think response to noise is idiosyncratic with the individual. People vary widely in their sensitivity to different frequencies and, of course, a car is a petri dish of noise sources: tires, road surface, wind, engine or motor noise that varies by speed and load, suspension movement, A/C systems . . . . . . .

It even varies by the position of one's head in the car. I talked to Zak Edson about why Lucid dropped its earlier plans for full-spectrum active noise cancellation. He said it proved to be insurmountably difficult in a car, as the microphones and speakers had to stay stationary relative to the passengers' ears for it to work across the full sound spectrum. The only manufacturers that use it thus far do so only at specific frequency bands. For example, my Honda Odyssey has active noise cancellation, but it is tuned only to the frequencies generated by the engine's cylinder shut-off function (for gas saving).

Interestingly, Tesla advertised active noise cancellation (but did not say it would be full spectrum) for the new Model S. The cars produced thus far don't have it, and Tesla's claims that it would soon come with a software update have, thus far, not been realized.

I'm not that sensitive (within limits) to noise in a moving car, and I'm not at all worried about that aspect of the Air. However, my brother is very sensitive to such noise and finds it the thing that bothers him most with his Tesla Model 3. The only thing a potential buyer with such sensitivity can do is wait for a comprehensive test drive on multiple surfaces at differing speeds -- something that many car sellers don't make easy.
 
I'm compiling a catalog of test drive reviews that are coming in. (These are reviews by people who've actually driven the car, not the ride-along reviews that came earlier.) If I've missed any, please add them to the list.

WRITTEN REVIEWS

Motor Trend


https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/2022-lucid-air-dream-edition-r-exclusive-first-drive-review/

Edmunds

https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/2021-lucid-air-first-drive-color-us-impressed.html

MSN

https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/ent...2022-lucid-air-dream-edition-range/ar-AAP0SsZ

CNET Road Show

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/2022-lucid-air-first-drive-review/

Mashable

https://mashable.com/article/lucid-air-review

TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/30/f...rjGP9Y1D_5bzi9cTi49BOzxXX8zu_yeik-oZ1t_XkyGio

Electrek

https://electrek.co/2021/09/30/my-p...-team-culture-at-lucid-motors-behind-the-air/


VIDEO REVIEWS

Motor Trend



Out of Spec Motoring


Two Bit da Vinci

 
InsideEVs posted a live podcast this morning:


Toward the end of the Lucid discussion, Kyle Conner and Tom Moloughney got into a lengthy discussion about NVH. Conner, who had earlier found tire noise to be excessive, opened by saying the car was "really quiet", but then he dove more deeply into the backseat noise he heard. Both he and Moloughney said the road surface they were on was terrible and played a big part in the noise. They also said a second car they drove with a different number of passengers sitting in different positions, felt quieter. After the ride, they met with the NVH engineers who showed them the charts showing that, objectively at least, the Air's NVH numbers were better than the Mercedes S Class against which they benchmarked. Bottom line, Conner and Moloughney need more time in the car(s) to figure out what they think about this issue.

Regarding build quality and what they saw on the production line and while driving the cars, they said the Air was incredibly well put together and added that the paint quality, in particular, was outstanding.
 
I'm glad to see it's not just me that's obsessed with the NVH component. However, Conner's initial description of the NVH is so contradictory it made my head spin. For the life of me, I don't know how you can state as he did, the car is 'really quiet', and then go on to say in the next sentence, "especially in the rear seat it was very loud" (my emphasis). Now breaking his phraseology down, "especially in the rear seat", can be easily interpreted as, 'it was noisy in the front seat, but especially loud in the rear seat'. You talk about a contradiction of terms, holy cow. Now yes, he mentions the road was rough, but he still felt there was more noise than he expected and Tom agreed. I drive an e-Tron on crazy rough roads (anyone know parts of the LIE in N.Y.?) and the car remains well insulated from road noise, not totally silent but what you'd expect in a luxury car. Tom was even willing to cut Lucid some slack since he felt these were preproduction cars, but then Connor said not this aspect of the car. Conner went on to mention that Lucid was very concerned about some of the NVH comments. It may be that a number of reviewers commented on this, I'm not sure.

Conner was absolutely correct when he said they were shown charts showing objectively it was quieter than the S class, but his ears heard differently. That's why I said objective measurements are important, but so are subjective evaluations. It would be interesting to see how much sound deadening material is placed in the wheel wells. That can be an important aspect of filtering out road noise.

Again, I hate to keep dwelling on this, but every video I've seen from inside the car while driving, depicts a vehicle that is not what I'd call 'quiet'. We can blame poorly recorded sound from a GoPro, a cellphone etc., but all the videos seemed to be equally noisy regardless of the camera used. Having seen a myriad of video reviews of electric cars of all brands, some seemed to have typical levels of noise and others seemed to be very quiet. So it's possible to record the interior of a moving vehicle and depict its quietness if it's truly quiet.

We'll see what Conner comes up with in a future drive. I've got plenty of time to decide, I won't get a phone call to finalize for a long time.
 
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You might remember that several months ago Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield of "Transport Evolved" did a ride-along in an earlier iteration of the car. The car sounded very noisy in the video, and she was deluged with comments and questions from viewers about how noisy the car was. She went so far as to post a second video to explain the situation. In her case, the camera/mic had been attached to the glass in the car, which greatly exaggerated the noise. She said that as a passenger she found the car commendably quiet. She also said that she was in the car for an additional hour beyond the recording space on the camera chip, during which they took the car up into mountain twisties. She said the car remained quiet -- and extremely poised -- in all the situations in which she experienced it.

I have watched innumerable videos of people in their Tesla Model S Plaids. In all the videos, the cars sound considerably noisier that our Plaid actually is. Don't let these video test drives get too much under your skin. The real test will come once you're in the car for you own assessment.

By the way, in the podcast Kyle Conner said maybe a buyer would let him test a Lucid Air after delivery. He lives in Miami and has parents in Naples where we live. I have contacted him to offer both our Plaid and our Lucid Air Dream Performance for comparison tests (both with 21" wheels). He has gotten back to me expressing his interest, so maybe before too long there will be a video of the two cars being test driven in identical conditions.
 
I agree, my personal assessment will be the final determining factor. Of course this depends on where I get to test drive the car and on what roads.

It‘s true that Nikki may have called the car commendably quiet, but then we have Conner & Tom saying something quite different. Is it possible her ride-along was on smooth roads contrary to Conner’s rough road experience? In my experience many cars with less than stellar noise control can sound great on smooth roads. It’s a different story when you take those same cars on less than desirable roads…think the LIE here in NY. I know where you are, in Florida, the roads are far better than here.
 
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