Kyle tried. The fact I was there should tell you how desperate he was for a knowledgeable Lucid driver, but in my opinion it wouldn't have made a significant difference, at least up to this point.
The circling back in Billings was indeed my fault due to misreading the readout on the charger. But in reality we realized as soon we pulled out of the parking lot and turned around at the next traffic light, so we only lost a few minutes of time at most.
I'll admit that throughout the trip I was more passive and not as assertive as i probably should have been, but that's just my nature. We were consistently arriving at chargers at 5% SoC or less up until this point, and I would argue that we were already pushing the car harder than we really ought to have been, especially as we had to reduce speed multiple times. Looking back I definitively would have charged longer to maintain higher speeds.
I have to respectfully disagree about any bias towards the Porsche. In respect to charging, the numbers really don't lie, and the Taycan can onboard more energy significantly faster than the Air. Unfortunately for the Lucid, the benefits of greater efficiency and longer range disappear pretty quickly on a continuous race like this.
Does the fact that the Taycan is outpacing the Lucid in the race so far indicate the Taycan is definitively the better long distance road tripper or better EV in general? I would argue no, as this race is not really a real world representation of how people travel. If teams only traveled 12-16 hours each day and then stopped to charge overnight as most folks would, the Lucid would undoubtedly be doing much better. I think it's meant to be more of an entertaining thought experiment rather than saying one car is definitively superior to another, aside from perhaps getting from point A to point B across 3000 miles nonstop, which is really a silly comparison, anyways. Also, the Model 3 is ahead of us at this point as well, so it's not just the Porsche.
I'll agree that we did not 100% optimize the car, but the same is true for every other car as well, including the Porsche. Although the Taycan did do really well optimizing overall, we all made mistakes and lost time that we really shouldn't have, and while it skews the times for each team a bit, I feel like it evened out more or less, in the end. I'm pretty confident that if we all did this again that we'd all be at least a little bit faster, but I don't feel like the positions would change significantly.
If anyone feels like this series is a disservice to Lucid or unfairly representing any of the cars, please reach out to Out of Spec and let them know. With enough feedback or suggestions for improvement I think they'd certainly consider revisiting the results in some way, but I'd ask to withhold judgements until the final video. If I or anyone else on the Lucid team did not meet your expectations I sincerely apologize, but I hope you can appreciate that all 3 of us really did our best at the time. I don't feel like we could have pushed the car any harder. Smarter and more wisely, absolutely, but not harder.
