Lucid Group, Inc., the electric car maker backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), recently gave a sneak peak of its forthcoming Lucid Air Dream Edition to a small group of media representatives at its main factory in Casa Grande, Arizona.
One of those media people, Chris Taylor from Mashable, gave the car a glowing review.
“This claim I will make,” Taylor wrote. “The Lucid Air is the future of cars.”
“Experience has taught us to be wary of any ‘car of the future,'” Taylor writes in his review after seeing the Lucid Air Dream edition, the highest-end model of Lucid that will start shipping to 13,000 pre-orders in October. “[F]inally, after years of waiting, a small group of media folks got to actually drive the Dream Edition. Smiles spread across once-skeptical faces. Because of the GT-like handling and torque, yes, but also because so much thought has gone into the interior experience. Sitting in the roomy back seat (which we also did) seems like something you could happily do for hundreds of miles at a time — and even when all occupants are over 6 feet tall, everyone has plenty of legroom.”
“The Air banishes car sickness alongside range anxiety, because you never feel like you’re crammed inside a box. Rather, you feel like you’re in the observation deck of a high-speed train,” Taylor writes. “The Lucid Air (especially in its “DreamDrive” autonomous mode) feels like a blueprint for our AI-driven future.”
To Taylor, the wait for the significant promises of Lucid’s first production model was worth it.
Based in Newark, California near Silicon Valley, Lucid Motors was founded in 2007 as Atieva by Bernard Tse, a former Tesla vice president and board member, and Sam Weng, a former exec at Oracle Corp and Redback Networks. Now, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund owns a majority stake in Lucid, which closed a $1.3 billion investment from the Kingdom’s PIF in 2019.
The company’s CEO and CTO is Peter Rawlinson, who is a former Vice President of Engineering at Tesla and Chief Engineer of the Model S.
While production is taking place in Arizona, the company has designs to open a plant in Saudi Arabia. The plant could be both a “significant investment commitment for the startup” but “also a potential boon for Saudi Arabia,” according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
Earlier this year, Lucid went public with a SPAC IPO.
