The car looked very good. The paint was similar to BMW carbon black except a little lighter shade of blue in the sunlight. As the light faded it started to look more navy then black. The interior felt more put together than my early build. I think it is probably a combination of every supplier working on improvements. The darker interior gave me more of a luxury impression. I like the interior of th DE, but I liked the Sapphire interior better. The windshield is not a reduced version of the glass roof. It is like a standard windshield with the sun visors attached to the roof. This gives the car a much different feel. I think I will miss the glass roof 30% of the time and the other 70% of the time I will enjoy the additional protection from the sun.
I didn’t get to drive so impressions are as a passenger. We discussed race tracks and how the DE and the Sapphire would perform on steep banking like Daytona. Early software builds he said would have been a problem, but that I could take either car out on the banking and they will perform very well. He mentioned the Sapphire going 205, that might indicate the software limit that will be on the car. The DE is limited to 168 as many of you already know. He also confirmed as suspected that turning off all driving aids, there are still some software protections in place. This makes sense as fully unrestrained the motors would be capable of just shredding the tires.
I have been driving the DE for almost 20 months. I have done countless acceleration runs and laps on a racetrack. Even whith all that the Sapphire was noticeably quicker. The on ramp we took was not a particularly long ramp and yet 100 appeared almost immediately and he lifted to let the car go into regen to get back to a reasonable speed before merging. The car feels smoother. Essentialy the entire suspension is a redesign. The suspension or the Michelins or most likely the combination of the 2 smoothed out imperfections in the road that might be jarring in the DE. Hopefully we will not see the sidewall bubbles in the Michelins. Exiting the freeway and returning via Mulholland drive up the mountain, the car was put into Sapphire mode, which replaces sprint. There is a track mode which we did not use on the street.
With Sapphire mode engaged the car uses vectoring to help rotate the car into turns. From the passenger seat it felt similar to rear wheel steering of the BMW. I think it will take hands on the wheel to really appreciate. The car turned in easily and we took a few turns at speeds I would have expected some tire squeal. The Michelins remained quiet. The car rotate and could have easily accelerated faster than we did out of the corner. There was no doubt the car was well within it’s limits. As I was thinking there was a lot more available, David turned and said ”this is nowhere near the limit.”
The last demonstration of the ride was the new in house traction control. Previously Lucid was using a Bosch controller whigh made adjustments every 20-30 milliseconds. The new inhouse unit responded every millisecond. At a stop with a 90 degree turn, mid turn, the accelerator was put to the floor, the car rotated and shot forward like a bat out of hell, no drama, just building speed at an incredible rate. Just about any other the car the intervention of the traction control would have been quite noticeable.
The software build was a 1.0.xx. I got a chance to go through all the menus and other than the Sapphire specific items, seems to be same underlying build as what we have on our cars now.
I know some of you will feel the glass roof is a defining element of the car. If it was available as an option, I’m not sure if I would get it or not. I am almost always driving when I am in the car and don’t spend a lot of time looking above the visor.
An additional note. I was told Lucid is working very hard on the V2H. There are regulatory issues and they are working together with other manufacturers and they are very eager to be able to demonstrate the bidirectional capabilities of the car. Of course they could not comment on any timeline. I also asked since they are suppling Formal E and Aston Martin, how about a crate motor for shops doing EV conversions.
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