Driving the 2024 Lucid Air Sapphire Will Make You Believe in Miracles

Until now, the Venn diagram circles representing ultra-luxurious four-door grand-touring machines and sports cars with sub-10-second acceleration through the quarter-mile have never touched. Add a third circle representing EVs with over 400 miles of range and you’re in deeply unfathomable territory. Want to make it even more difficult? Let’s up the ante and lower the quarter-mile acceleration bogey to nine seconds flat. That’s ridiculous, right? Nope. Meet the Lucid Air Sapphire.

Best Acceleration Ever?

Lucid’s claimed performance would make the Sapphire quicker than any car we’ve tested. To see for myself, I ease one through the water box at California’s Sonoma Raceway and line up with the slightly uphill drag strip. With the traction control off and the powertrain set to Track mode’s Dragstrip setting, which unlocks the full 1234 horsepower, I briefly mash the accelerator to spin all four tires to build heat, then back up and do it again. Back in Drive, I creep up to the staging lights that trigger the Christmas tree. With the brake fully depressed, I then floor the accelerator, wait for the lights to approach green, then sidestep the brake.

Incredibly, the tires vaguely spin for a few dozen yards, then fully hook up as the car lunges up the track. The sensation of uninterrupted acceleration is ungodly, and when I rip past the finish and climb onto the binders, the in-car GPS readout displays some staggering numbers: 2.2 seconds to 60 mph and a quarter-mile of 9.28 seconds at 153 mph. It’s hard to be disappointed by such epic performance, especially since the shockingly quick Ferrari 296GTB plug-in hybrid we recently tested needed 2.4 seconds to reach 60 mph and finished the quarter in 9.7 seconds at 150 mph. But then I realized the wheelspin signaled a mistake. I had been advised to reengage traction control after the water-box burnouts, but I hadn’t.

Back in line for a second run, I repeat the burnout procedure but make sure to reengage traction control before creeping up to the tree. Bam! No hint of wheelspin this time, and the feeling of being shot out of a cannon is even more acute. The timer backs this up with even more outrageous numbers: 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, then 9.05 seconds and 154 mph at the stripe. Later on, as conditions improve, someone else manages 8.95 seconds. We’ll stop short of giving the Sapphire a Major Award just yet because these unofficial numbers were not generated using our usual procedure. We don’t test on a slightly uphill drag strip from a tacky start box on preheated tires fresh from water-box burnouts, and we do publish a two-way average to account for wind.

Still. There’s no denying the Sapphire is badass.

Setting Sapphire to the Road Course

On the Sonoma Raceway road-race circuit, a Lucid Air Grand Touring ahead of me slews sideways out of the tighter corners as it puts the power down in clouds of smoke. At the helm is David Lickfold, the chassis and vehicle dynamics director I met when I drove an Air Sapphire prototype some months ago. He’s pushing hard to make sure he’s not holding me up in the more track-worthy Sapphire. It’s not working, as I’m barely fogging the inside of my visor while he’s all arms and elbows dealing with tires beginning to shed slender strips of rubber. He soon waves me past, putting the lead-follow pretext to an end.

I’m unsurprised to learn that the Sapphire has a lot more to give, even though the 1234-hp Dragstrip power setting has been dialed back to 767 horsepower in the Endurance track mode that enables consecutive lapping. In between, there’s a 1003-hp Hot Lap setting for a single-lap time attack. The fortified Air devours this technical circuit, which is reminiscent of Virginia International Raceway—where I sampled the prototype—in that it has numerous elevation changes, blind corners, and uncertain crests that can upset a car at the apex. Here, on the very eve of the first customer deliveries, the Sapphire’s three-motor powertrain feels fully dialed in, with none of the traction-management teething issues we experienced on the prototype.

In fact, Sonoma’s plunging Carousel is eerily similar to VIR’s Hog Pen final turn, and I’m able to confidently plant my right foot without hesitation as the long corner opens onto a blisteringly fast straight. A few seconds later it’s time to stand on the brakes—massive 10-piston front calipers and carbon-ceramic rotors—to haul the approximately 5400-pound Sapphire down to turn-in speed, then smoothly feed on the power through the hairpin and storm through the esses, tickling the curbing on the way past.

Meanwhile, Back in the Real World

None of the above would seem remotely possible if you first drove a Sapphire on the street, as it feels utterly at home on the nearby wine country byways, cruising in quiet comfort with the same grace as other Air sedans. There’s nothing hard-edged about how it rides, and the only thing notable about the steering is the ultrasuede covering that connects the driver’s hands to a very appropriate level of feel and effort. The Sapphire’s performance seats that held fast on the circuit are suitably comfortable, and their more aggressive bolstering isn’t anything like a nuisance in more relaxed driving.

The 1234-hp Dragstrip and 767-hp Endurance settings used on the track seem like they belong to another world, as the Sapphire also purrs serenely and can deliver a fantastic 427 miles of EPA combined range on the same staggered 20-inch front and 21-inch rear Michelin Pilot Sport 4S performance rubber (custom-tailored with the Cup 2 shoulder compound) that glued it to strip and track alike. Should you need to get past a gawking tourist, however, the Sapphire will oblige with more authority than you can imagine.

How It Came to Be

The existence of the tri-motor Sapphire was planned from the start. The Air’s basic chassis stiffness and five-link front, integral-link multilink rear suspension geometry were designed accordingly. The space for three motors was allocated from the get-go, so the Sapphire’s rear trunk volume doesn’t shrink by a single cubic foot. Also, the dual rear-motor upgrade is a ridiculously modular one, with a second unit merely flipped around and mounted nose to nose with the first, with the mechanical differential removed because it’s no longer necessary.

Lucid also made the decision to forgo a blended brake pedal, going instead for a divide-and-conquer strategy that uses accelerator lift alone to trigger regeneration. That left the brake engineers free to optimize the hydraulic brakes of all Airs for feel and response, which in turn made implementing the Sapphire’s massively powerful and communicative carbon-ceramic brake system a much more straightforward engineering task. Furthermore, the adaptive Bilstein dampers were initially specified to have the tuning bandwidth to accommodate Sapphire performance, and so the necessary internal shock valving tuning tweaks and adaptive-control software adjustments didn’t force a move to different hardware.

But the same is not true of the stability- and traction-control systems, it seems. The supplier-provided software wasn’t up to the Jekyll-and-Hyde challenge that the Sapphire presented. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but Lucid was toying with the idea of scrapping the supplier option for the Sapphire in favor of in-house stability- and traction-control software while I was with them at VIR. They had the brainpower to write code for other vehicle systems, so why not this?

After this drive, it’s easy to see that that move has paid off mightily. But there’s more to it than that. This illustrates how Lucid’s willingness and confidence to go its own way and leverage its in-house expertise can do great things. We first got this impression when we understood the brilliance of their compact electric motors, batteries, and charge-management systems. Those first Airs offered Chevy Bolt levels of efficiency in a long-wheelbase BMW 7-series-sized luxury EV that delivered unheard-of range and comfort. With the Lucid Air Sapphire, Lucid has brought in that third Venn diagram circle, the one that has Ferrari 296GTB levels of performance (and then some). Damn.

Source: Reviews - aranddriver.com