American EV start-up stunned on debut with the Air saloon; now it has applied the same principles to a seven-seat SUV
To say that the Lucid Gravity is extremely spacious might seem trivial, given that it’s a seven-seat SUV.It’s not trivial, though, because the car industry has produced its fair share of inverse tardises since moving to EVs – big cars that make you wonder where all the space has gone. Take the surprisingly cosy Porsche Taycan, all those rear-driven electric BMWs with no frunk and the Renault 5, which looks and feels like a small car until you park it next to a Clio.Packaging batteries, motors, inverters and other magic boxes is quite a different game to doing the same with engines, gearboxes and fuel tanks, necessitating a change in mindset for the world’s automotive engineers.Tailoring a car around a big monolith of a battery is something at which Tesla is better than any of the ‘legacy’ manufacturers, because it has always started from a blank slate with few ICE preconceptions. And it’s no surprise that Lucid is just as adept, given the number of Tesla defectors in its ranks – not least strategic technical advisor and former CEO Peter Rawlinson.
