The Lucid Gravity Is The Best Big Luxury Electric SUV You Can Buy Right Now

Like most startups in the history of the automobile, Lucid Motors has had what could charitably be called a bumpy history. Its first product, the Air sedan, was first shown publicly in 2017 (although I got a background, deep dive on it and a look at the first prototype earlier, in November 2016 at the Los Angeles auto show). However, challenges with raising the funds to complete development and build a factory meant that it wouldn’t get to customers until late 2021. Despite the generally positive reception, high costs, supply chain issues, and a market move away from sedans have limited sales. Lucid is now ready for take-two with the Gravity, an SUV that the company is billing as a seven-seat supercar, and we’ve just had our first opportunity to drive it. 

Lucid brought us to Los Olivos, California to get a taste of this new form of Gravity, where we learned all about the technical details from subject matter experts and got to drive it in some surprisingly challenging conditions. Given that Lucid is still a relatively small company that has yet to come anywhere close to profitability, you might be forgiven for taking a look at the Gravity and assuming it’s just a taller, longer roof version of the Air. 

It certainly shares family design DNA with the sedan, but the reality is that from the time I got that first behind-the-scenes look at the Air in 2016, the company has been in a constant state of development and improvement. The Air that went on sale in 2021 looked much like the one from five years earlier, but while former CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson was trying to raise funds, most of what’s under the skin was substantially redesigned, much of it more than once. 

The same is true of the Gravity. The biggest theme for Lucid is efficiency and the engineering team found many ways to improve on that for the new car. They also adapted many of the lessons learned from production challenges on the Air. 

What is an SUV Anyway?

Some have criticized the Gravity, calling it more of a minivan than an SUV because of its profile. In some respects, this isn’t a totally off-base call as the Gravity has a surprisingly short front end with the base of the windshield well out over the front wheels. The proportions are not altogether different from the Kia Carnival but of course Kia doesn’t call that a minivan anymore either.

The truth is as SUVs have grown in market prominence, they have become so diverse that the term doesn’t really have any meaning anymore. Is a Hyundai Ioniq 5 an SUV? Or a hatchback? What about a Toyota Crown Signia. It’s really just an overused marketing term. That said, the Lucid Gravity is a vehicle with a tremendous amount of utility and immense sporting capability. 

So let’s just set aside the taxonomy. 

What about the design?

Derek Jenkins has been Lucid’s vice president of design and product since work began on the Air and he continues to oversee the team that created the look of the Gravity. Aerodynamic efficiency remains a key element of the brand’s look with smooth flowing contours, but a real sense of presence on the road. 

At the front, the Gravity retains the metallic nose blade above the slim, horizontal headlamps and the linear, vertical running lamps. Around the back, the slim, floating, lightblade taillamp is also echoed from the sedan. The aluminum trim from the A-pillar, across the top of the greenhouse to the D-pillar is also a Lucid signature, but here the rearmost pillar is significantly thicker than before. 

Clamshell openings at the front and back are another brand signature. This time, though, the frunk opening extends down to the bumper for easier loading, but there is also a pad that can fold out to make the frunk into a bench seat for “frunk-gating” or just watching the sunset at the beach. At the rear, the tailgate also wraps around the sides as on the sedan trunk to maximize the aperture for loading. 

Limiting aerodynamic drag is key for an electric vehicle because any effort that it takes to move air out of the way is taken away from the kinetic energy that can be recovered through the motors and put back in the battery for more range. But aero efficiency isn’t just about the drag coefficient, you also have to multiply that by frontal area. 

Jenkins highlighted four 3-row premium competitors: the Rivian R1S, Cadillac Escalade IQ, Mercedes-Benz EQS SUV, and BMW X7. The Lucid has a coefficient of drag of 0.24, but is also the lowest with the smallest frontal area of the group. Nonetheless, only the enormous Escalade outdoes the Gravity in total interior volume at 130 cubic feet to the 114 for the seven-seat Lucid and 120 cubic feet for the five-seat version. The Cadillac also has a marginally more EPA-rated range at 460 miles vs 450 for the Lucid. 

However, the Lucid is by far the lightest of the three electric utilities at 5,966 lbs compared to 9,134 for the Cadillac. The gas-engined BMW undercuts them all at 5,417 lbs. But the Cadillac and the Lucid are the only members of the group that actually offer a third row seat usable by adults, while the Rivian and the Germans have almost no usable leg room in the back. 

The Gravity gets rid of the Air’s three-screen design in favor of two screens that solve some issues presented by the Air’s setup. The Air featured a 34-inch curved display and smaller, portrait-orientation screen below it that retracted into the dashboard. While this gave the Air’s interior a cleaner look when the car was off, it also added significant cost and complexity. The lower screen also required the driver to look farther away from the road when viewing it. The Gravity’s single primary screen, and its higher position versus the Air’s, is an improvement. The physical volume and climate controls that previously sat on the Air’s dash above the screen are now mounted to the lower edge of the Gravity’s display. 

The primary curved display that floats on top of the dashboard is still the same size at 34 inches and has roughly the same shape as the Air. But instead of three separate LCD displays behind a common sheet of glass, there is now a single OLED panel. Light always leaks through LCD panels, but since each pixel of an OLED is self-illuminating, the dark areas of the screen will now actually be black when driving at night instead of dark grey. 

Like many other newer vehicles, the steering wheel has now been squashed vertically, and sits fully below the display, leaving all of it visible instead of looking through the upper portion of the wheel to see the instrument display. The controls on the steering wheel are also new to the Gravity. On each side, there is a clickable touch panel that supports gestures in addition to clicks. When you touch the panel with a thumb, the available controls pop up on the screen directly in front of you. 

Driver assist controls are on the left, and media controls are on the right. When alert widgets pop up on the display, a thumb swipe across the panel dismisses them. You can also scroll through a variety of widgets on either side of the instruments with a swipe up or down. For example, information like the trip computer, tire pressures, and other data can appear on the left with an up or down swipe, and media information on the right. A horizontal swipe with the left thumb can change display themes, including one called Zen that shows nothing but essentials like speed, odometer, and turn signals. With the optional DreamDrive Premium, engaging the turn signal will bring up a camera view of your blind spot on the cluster display area. 

Another major change from the UI design of the Air is that information on the right portion of the top display is now decoupled from the central display. On the Air, when Navigation was selected, the lower screen would show an overview of the whole route while the upper display would show a zoomed-in view of your current area. Switching to media mode would show similar, differing levels of detail of what you were listening to. But in the Air, you couldn’t show the map on one screen and media on the other. In the Gravity, you can do exactly that. 

One final note on the dashboard is that Lucid deserves credit for retaining manually adjustable air vents in the dashboard. No automaker should ever be forgiven for putting vent controls in the touchscreen interface. 

In the second row of seats, Lucid has provided plenty of room and also built tray tables in the back of the front seats so kids can place their phones or tablets or happy meals on them without having to hold them. All Gravity Grand Touring models get a four-zone climate control system as standard. With the optional convenience package, the rear seats are also heated as are the windshield wipers. The second and third row seats easily accommodate my 5-foot-10-inch frame and offer a decent amount of headroom and legroom. 

Connecting The Electronic Dots

All of the cool features included on a modern, premium vehicle require lots of software and computing hardware to run them. As part of the overall upgrade of all systems in the Gravity, Lucid has developed an all-new electrical/electronic (E/E) architecture that uses the increasingly popular zonal layout. 

That means the Gravity has two central computers and 3 zone controllers. One central computer manages the driver assist and chassis controls and is powered by 2 Nvidia Orin system-on-chip (SoC) processors. Each of these provides up to 250 trillion operations per second (TOPS) for processing sensor signals, handling the AI perception algorithms, and handling path planning. The Orin is rapidly becoming one of the go-to SoCs for these vehicle control tasks and is used by Rivian, Volvo, Polestar, numerous Chinese automakers, and most recently announced by General Motors. 

Currently, the Gravity offers a hands-on, eyes-on level 2 assist that handles lane centering, adaptive cruise control, and lane change on demand. In the coming months, Lucid will begin offering DreamDrive 2 Pro, which will add hands-off, eyes-on capabilities similar to GM Super Cruise, with plans for more upgrades in the future. Like the Air, the Gravity is also equipped with a Robosense lidar sensor in the front fascia that will help enable this. Lucid is running Nvidia’s Drive OS on this platform and building their own ADAS and chassis control software. 

The other central compute unit uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8295 SoC to handle all of the infotainment and instrumentation needs, and it has 32 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage so it should have plenty of headroom for future needs. The Qualcomm system is also running a hypervisor that allows multiple operating systems to run on it in virtual machines. In this case, the left side of the display that contains the instruments is powered by a QNX real-time operating system, while the infotainment stack is running Android. 

The three zonal controllers utilize Infineon TriCore TC397 chips. These chips feature what’s known as lock-step operation for safety applications. This essentially means that the same algorithms will be running simultaneously on two different cores, and they have to agree. If the cores have different results, the chip goes into a safe state for backup and an alert is given. There are two zone controllers in the front corners of the Gravity and one in the rear and they handle a variety of tasks including lighting, sensor signal processing, and power distribution. Everything is connected by a high-speed automotive ethernet network to reduce the amount of wiring in the car and improve data throughput. 

Powering all of this are two independent 12V power rails and two 12-volt batteries, one for each side of the car. This way if something fails, at least half the car still has power so it can be brought to a safe stop. Finally, there is a small 75W DC-DC converter in the battery pack that is before the contactor. When the car is shut off, any systems that are still drawing power such as a sentry mode are getting that power from this supply that comes straight from the high-voltage battery. It’s 92% efficient and it means that the Gravity should never have a problem with dead 12V batteries that prevent the car from starting. It also preserves the life of the 12V batteries by not constantly cycling them. 

Protecting all of this are 3 solid state power protection panels, one in the rear, one in the cockpit and one in the frunk. These are solid-state circuit breakers that replace traditional fuses. Because fuses never need to be replaced, they don’t need to be mounted somewhere that is accessible by the driver and they also respond much faster. Traditional fuses also have much looser tolerances with plus or minus 15% error from the rated current. That tolerance needs to be compensated with thicker, heavier wire for safety. Using electronic fuses allows that extra wiring buffer to be reduced. 

Jean-Phillipe Gauthier, vice president of digital, provided an example of how this can be used to improve functionality:

“Let’s say that I have a heated steering wheel, and the wire that goes to it is rated for five amps. Well, it’s rated for five amps when it’s 80 degrees outside, or something like that. When I use the heated steering wheel, it’s much colder outside. So what I can do, I can compensate for temperature, and let’s send seven amps instead of five, and I know that, knowing my wiring size and the temperature of the wire, I can push more without problem. So it gives you the opportunity for a little better performance of those types of features.”

While the zonal architecture does allow for reduction of discrete electronic control units, Lucid has retained some from suppliers for certain functions. For example the three steering actuators (one on the front and two on the rear) and Bosch i-Booster for the brakes each have a small, low power ECU that actually controls the hardware. Lucid’s software running on the Orin platform determines how much steering or braking input is required to control the vehicle, and sends those signals to those ECUs via APIs and they manage the actuators to make it happen. 

One other interesting electrical detail of the Gravity is the charging port. When it was originally designed, it still used a CCS charge port and the two prototypes that were revealed at the 2023 Los Angeles auto show had the charge port on the left front fender like the Air. However, around that same time, Lucid made the decision to adopt the NACS charge port. With that decision came the follow-up to move the charge port to the left rear corner, just like Tesla to make it easier to use Superchargers with their very short cables, so the engineers had to completely rework the charging circuit, a far from trivial task. 

Moving Things Along

The propulsion system of the Gravity is fundamentally similar to the Air, but redesigned for better performance and efficiency. The permanent magnet traction motors have been reworked for improved thermal management for better sustained performance based on work that was done for the Air Sapphire. These motors are still incredibly small and power dense at 8.5 kW/kg. The rear drive unit including the reduction gears, differential, and power electronics weighs just 79 kg and produces up to 670 hp.

The rotor winding in the rear drive unit also serves a secondary purpose. The Gravity is designed to be able to DC fast charge at up to 1,000V and features a native J3400/NACS charge port. 

However, current V3 Tesla Superchargers only operate at 500V and 500A. That rotor winding works as an inductor coil, essentially turning the rear drive unit into a transformer to boost the 500V input from the Supercharger to 1,000V. This allows the Gravity to charge at 220 kW, nearly double what the new Hyundai Ioniq 5 can achieve on the same chargers. Teslas can actually charge at up to 250-kW, but they only stay at that peak power for a short time and start ramping down when the battery state of charge gets to above about 20%. The Gravity’s improved thermal management and updated cell design can maintain that 220-kW rate to about 45% charge and ramps down more slowly, remaining above 100-kW at 80% charge. 

When connected to a 350-kW or more CCS charger, it charges even faster. The Out of Spec YouTube channel recently tested a Gravity with one of Chargepoint’s new 400-kW chargers at their headquarters. The Gravity stayed at 400-kW past 20% and remained above 200-kW past 50%. They were able to add 100 miles of range in just 5.2 minutes and doubled that in 10.6 minutes. The Supercharger took 8.6 and 16.5 minutes respectively for the same charge levels. 

To achieve this, the Gravity has redesigned 2170 cylindrical cells supplied by Panasonic. The chemistry remains nickel manganese, cobalt but the recipe has been revised for better energy and power density, with the latter helping on charging performance and discharge for acceleration. Lucid isn’t revealing too many details yet on the new cells, but they also feature a multi-tab arrangement for better heat transfer. 

Managing the Motion

Getting all this power to the ground in a controlled fashion is no easy feat. All Gravity models get a staggered wheel set up with the base being 20-inch front/21-inch rear wheels with Hankook Ion Evo LM1 all-season tires. The first upgrade brings 21/22-inch wheels with Michelin Primacy LM1 tires and dynamic handling package bumping that to 22/23-inch wheels with Pirelli P-Zero 5 LM1 summer performance tires. 

The suspension of the Gravity is also new because it needed to accommodate more wheel travel. The front remains a multi-link layout with virtual steering axis as on the Air, but all the components are new. The Air’s integral link rear suspension is replaced with a new 5-link layout with longer arms. 

The Gravity Grand Touring that is available now has standard air spring suspension that can raise or lower the car from 5.2 inches to 9.3 inches. The standard setup has single-chamber springs. The dynamic handling package has three chamber springs that allow for varying the effective spring rate based on the selected drive mode. In smooth mode, the springs are softer and more compliant, while they get progressively stiffer in swift and sprint. The rear springs are also adjusted when towing. All Gravity Grand Touring models get standard electronically controlled Bilstien dampers that can adjust every 2 milliseconds. 

Despite being an EV with prodigious regenerative braking capability, the Gravity also has some hefty friction brakes as well. The front corners have 390 mm rotors with 6-piston Brembo fixed calipers while the rears have slightly smaller and thinner 388 mm rotors with 4-piston fixed calipers. While most of the deceleration work in normal driving is handled by regen, you still need the brakes for maximum emergency braking. The large rotors also have lots of thermal mass which is handy because the Gravity system uses the friction brakes to handle torque vectoring which can heat the brakes up if used too aggressively. The rear corners also have a second, smaller, dry, electrically-actuated caliper on each side to serve as the parking brake.

A Bosch electric power assisted steering system is standard on the front axle while the dynamic handling package adds a pair of ZF electric steering actuators to the rear wheels, with one connected to each wheel. Like all four-wheel-steering systems, the Gravity steers the rear wheels in the opposite direction at lower speeds for tighter turning and better responsiveness and steers all the wheels in the same direction as speed climbs to improve stability. However, most systems have the crossover at somewhere around 15-20 mph. Lucid is doing this at about 40 mph to improve overall handling responsiveness of the Gravity. 

Hitting the Twisties

The Lucid engineering team lead by Eric Bach created a truly second-generation product, but how well does it actually work? To find out, they let us loose on a route that took us from Los Olivos, California, a few miles up the 101 freeway and then off onto twisting mountain roads west of the Los Padres National Forest, finally emerging in Nipomo before turning back around. 

The cars we had available to drive were all finished Aurora Green Metallic with the stealth appearance package, the dynamic handling package and literally every other currently available option. The one I drove had the Tahoe leather interior. Lucid was still working on an issue with the heads-up display so those were turned off during our drive, but the position of the display above the dashboard makes the HUD somewhat superfluous anyway. 

While Lucid does provide physical controls for audio, climate and seat adjustments, the mirror controls and steering wheel adjustment are partially in the touch screen. They are only one level down and then the actual adjustment is made with the touchpad on the right steering wheel spoke. Individual drivers can save their profiles and this is fine most of the time, but if you’re doing a long road trip, and you need to readjust from time to time, this might be problematic. 

The seats are very comfortable and supportive despite not having a huge number of adjustments. As we set out and then got on the highway, it was immediately apparent that Lucid has done an excellent job on sound management. Even on the high-performance tires, the cabin was very quiet which is great if you just want a stress free environment. If you want some music, the 22-speaker audio system sounds fantastic, even to my old tinnitus-addled ears. 

But the real fun started when we got off the highway and headed into the mountains. For the next hour or so, we were on some fantastic barely two-lane roads with no shoulders. As we climbed, the gap between corners seemed to get progressively shorter and most of those corners were completely blind, meaning we really needed to stay on our side rather than clipping apexes to the left. We switched the drive mode from the soft that we left the hotel on to sport and then sprint to get the most out of the Pirelli tires. 

Despite weighing three tons, the combination of good summer performance tires and a really well-sorted suspension made the Gravity a real pleasure to drive. While most of the turns were very tight with multiple hairpins, the oddly shaped steering wheel wasn’t a problem at all, thanks to a surprisingly fast variable ratio steering system. 

Tesla opted to go with a fully by-wire steering system on the Cybertruck that has no mechanical connection to the wheels in order to avoid going hand over hand with its flat steering wheel. Lucid went a more conventional route with the steering ratio starting at 13:1 and gradually tightening to 8.5:1. The result was I was able to go through the whole mountain route only having to turn the wheel more than about 100 degrees in either direction a couple of times. Most of the time my hands were at 9 and 3 and stayed there. Even with the electric assist, the Gravity has surprisingly good feedback through the wheel. 

The only ergonomic stumble I really experienced is that the A-pillars are quite thick, and while they don’t stretch out quite as far in front of you as in a Cybertruck, they did produce some notable blind spots toward the front corners. It wasn’t a deal breaker, but it is something to take note of and be mindful when driving. The hood is relatively short in this vehicle and isn’t really visible from any typical driving position so you’ll want to take advantage of parking sensors when maneuvering in a parking lot. 

The Gravity didn’t really have many artificial sounds if any, and frankly that was fine – even though I like what Hyundai does on the Ioniq 5 N. I’ve always been skeptical of companies developing automated driving systems with cameras only and their logic that humans drive with just two eyes, so why can’t a car do it. Setting aside the arguments about such systems, the reality is humans use (or should use) multiple senses, including hearing and touch – both through the seats of their pants, and the forces through the wheel. When driving rapidly in an environment like this, it’s important to listen for the sound of the tires to know when they are approaching the limit of adhesion. Lack of fake engine sounds makes it easier to do that, and it came in handy on the early curves to help know the limits of the Gravity and they are surprisingly high. 

I was also particularly impressed with how Lucid has tuned both the motor control and regen braking. While I could probably go a bit faster overall by carrying a bit more speed deeper toward a corner and braking harder and later, I had a driving partner and that sort of behavior tends to induce nausea in people who aren’t in control of the vehicle. When set to its highest level, the Gravity will pull over 3/10ths of a g of decel just by backing off the accelerator. That’s enough that I could maintain a surprisingly brisk pace through the mountains while being smooth enough not to upset other people’s tummies.  

The tuning of the 800+ horsepower and the regen makes it very easy to modulate the one pedal and get smooth, brisk driving at speed. When you need more velocity, it is very readily available as I found when I was stuck behind a very large camper. I pulled out to peak if it was clear and squeezed the go pedal and left the camper behind at an absurd rate. I genuinely had a fun time with this seven seat family hauler, but the fun was just beginning. 

Besides the quiet environment, the Gravity was also very comfortable despite the 22- and 23-inch tires. The triple-chamber air springs and fancy dampers no doubt had a positive effect here. We didn’t hit any Michigan-style potholes in California (I did once pop a tire on an Air Grand Touring with similar-sized wheels on a pothole near my home in Michigan), but some of the pavement was surprisingly uneven and the Gravity soaked it up with aplomb. 

Playing in the Sandbox

Regular customer deliveries of the Gravity are due to start later this month, but since this is a software-defined vehicle, not every feature is fully baked yet. Such is the nature of SDVs, but it means that your car can get better over time. Fortunately for early Air owners, Lucid has lived up to this promise and fixed a lot of early problems and added new features thanks to dozens of OTA software updates. 

Note: The Gravity models we used for the dirt driving portion were old development prototypes, and some of the fit and finish on trim and panels that is visible in the photos is not representative of the production models we drove on the road.

Among the upcoming features are hands-off, eyes-on driving assist similar to GM’s Super Cruise. Another is the addition of a fourth drive mode, Terrain. While the Gravity isn’t meant to tackle the Rubicon trail, its standard air spring suspension enables it to raise itself up to 9.3 inches of ground clearance. 

The fully in-house developed slip control and driver assist software stack also means the engineers have more freedom to use the hardware on the car in new and sometimes very fun ways. When Terrain mode is selected, drivers can then enable one of three sub-modes. A key aspect of Terrain mode is the use of brake-actuated torque vectoring to emulate locking differentials at each axle. Having dual motors can already emulate the behavior of a locking center differential by simply controlling them in sync. By default in terrain mode, the torque bias is roughly 40/60 front to rear which will help with kicking out the tail when desired.

The default keeps all of the stability and traction control active, but adjusts thresholds to allow for better control on deformable surfaces like sand, dirt and gravel while keeping the driver out of trouble. This is perfect for taking the unpaved trail to a cabin by the lake, or heading up to the mountains to go skiing. 

The middle mode opens up the thresholds for traction control and stability control to enable the car to slide around a bit more. This can be handy when you’re in some fresh, deep snow and getting extra slip can help get everything moving. Finally, the most aggressive mode pretty much turns off those controls and let’s go wild. 

We started off going in circles in a horse corral to get a feel for how it changes through the three modes, and it definitely gets looser with each step. Lucid also set up a dirt hill that we climbed halfway up and then stopped. The system is designed to automatically hold the vehicle when you lift off on a grade without having to manually engage a hill hold. There’s no separate hill descent control, but with the regenerative braking on high, the control precision you get just from modulating the accelerator pedal makes a separate function somewhat superfluous. Descending the hill was easy to manage. 

The cars we used for this off-road portion were shod with the standard Michelin Primacy all-season tires (no cheating with knobby all-terrains) and it still performed quite capably. Lucid has tested the Gravity on BF Goodrich K02s, and while there are no current plans to offer them as a factory option, nothing can be ruled out for the future. 

After warming up with some dirt donuts, we moved over to a larger horse paddock where they set up a rallycross course (essentially an autocross on dirt and sand). After a recon lap to check out the course in medium mode, we switched over to everything off and hit the accelerator. With the electronic nannies mostly sidelined, the Gravity was an absolute hoot to hoon around the course, hanging the back end out and putting in lots of counter steer with that squared off wheel. According to Lucid vehicle controls engineer Esther Unti, when running the same course on the K02s, the Gravity could carry another 40 mph!

Is an actual paying Gravity owner ever going to a rallycross in their 3-row utility? Almost certainly not. But the beauty of an SDV is that you can add some code with the hardware you’ve already got for normal operation and get something entirely different. Given how excited Tesla owners get about their Christmas light shows and flappy bird doors, I’m sure that Lucid owners will appreciate knowing what’s available even if they only ever use the basic terrain mode to get to a ski lodge in Vail or Jackson Hole. 

The Bottom Line

The Lucid Gravity Grand Touring has a starting price of $94,900. Equipped as we drove it, the fully load example came to $120,250. The Touring model coming later this year will start at $79,900 and we expect there will be a Pure edition at some point as well that drops closer to $70,000. 

The base model with the 20/21-inch wheels and Hankook tires has a rated range estimate of 450 miles. With the big Pirellis on the handling package that number dips to a still very impressive 386 miles, which equates to about 3.14 miles/kWh. While we didn’t do a formal range test, we covered 145 miles and used 49% of the battery which works out to about 280 miles. Given that we were doing the polar opposite of driving even remotely efficiently, I consider that a pretty good triumph. I’m fairly confident that in more typical driving, the Gravity with the Pirelli tires could probably approach that label estimate, and a base model would be well up over 400 miles. 

With the optional towing package, the Gravity is capable of towing up to 6,000-lbs, but there is the usual caveat on towing. Depending on the size and shape of the trailer, efficiency will often drop by more than 50%, which means you’ll end up with half or less of the rated range. This is true of both combustion and electric vehicles, but the charging time and layout of most charging stations makes this more problematic for EVs. We didn’t get to do any towing, so for now we’ll take Lucid at its word on towing capability and assume range will be somewhere between 150 and 200 miles.

Combined with the very fast charging capability and ability to haul a family and their stuff, the Gravity is a pretty impressive option for someone looking for a luxury three-row utility vehicle. Is it a seven-seat supercar as Lucid is calling it? That’s perhaps stretching it a bit too far. But comparing what the Gravity offers to the likes of the Mercedes EQS SUV or Cadillac Escalade IQ, it’s a no-brainer as a much better value, with better range than Mercedes and a maxed-out price $10,000 less than the entry price of the Cadillac. The Rivian R1S has less room inside, is in the same price range for comparable performance, and has worse ergonomics because everything is in the touchscreen. 

I would say that at this moment in time, the Lucid Gravity is the best option among this group, even if some might quibble about whether it’s truly an SUV (and for the record, the quibblers are wrong).