No Contest: The 2025 Lucid Air Touring

Want a luxury sedan, but an electric luxury sedan?

It's very much a mixed bag out there. The Mercedes EQE hasn't set the world on fire, Genesis has already pulled the Electrified G80 from the North American market, the BMW i5, as good as it is, is just the gasoline-powered 5-Series with a different propulsion system, and the Tesla Model S...well, it's a 13-year-old car that only gets mentioned in the "luxury" class because of its price tag.

Want to impress and be impressed?

You, my friend, want a Lucid Air.

Regular readers will remember that the entry-level Lucid Air Pure won Western Automotive Journalists' Best of the Bay 2024 awards for Best EV and Best Overall Vehicle. The car you see here is the next rung up the ladder---the Lucid Air Touring.

An extra $9,000 bumps the horsepower up from 430 to 620, slaps the 0-60 time down from 4.5 seconds to 3.2 and---remarkably---boosts range per charge from 420 miles to 431.

Range estimates vary by wheel selection on the Air Touring. The 20-inch Aero Lite wheels that you see above are the most expensive ($1,750 extra) and least efficient, dropping EPA-estimated range to 377 miles.

Still, that was sufficient for me to take the fully charged Air Touring from suburban Sacramento near the Sierra Nevada foothills to the Bay Area city of Alameda and back in one day, a 210-mile roundtrip, and have 167 miles of range remaining when I parked it for the night.

When you do need to recharge, Lucid's 900-volt charging architecture makes it one of the fastest-charging vehicles on the market. Lucid cites a potential 200 miles worth of range within 12 minutes on certain DC fast chargers. When I recharged the Air Touring, it was on a lower-output charger that was throttling its output, so I wasn't able to duplicate Lucid's claim, but I also don't doubt it.

As for the drive itself, the Air Touring is very much the strong, silent type---a very hushed cabin, almost devoid of road and wind noise, enormous reserves of power below your right foot and, when I chose to use it, an excellent adaptive cruise control system in the standard Dream Drive Premium, which has the smoothest distance-keeping function I have ever experienced in 25 years of testing vehicles with smart cruise control.

If the trunk looks enormous, it is. That's 22.1 cubic feet of trunk space, and it's the largest trunk of any sedan on the market today.

Want more? No problem.

There's another ten cubic feet of space in the frunk (front trunk).

Lucid says there is only 37.6 inches of rear seat legroom. I'm stunned. I'm 5'11. The front seat is set for me. I've sat in rear seats with more than 40 inches of legroom that didn't feel that spacious. The positioning and bolstering of the seats is sublime. This is limo-like comfort.

The front seats are also straight-up masterpieces---all-day comfortable. I'm serious. If you told me I had to drive to Salt Lake City right now, 638 miles and ten-ish hours, the only way I'm saying yes is if I'm driving the Lucid Air Touring.

The base price of the 2025 Lucid Air Touring is $78,900 ($80,400 including destination). That comes with a lot of standard equipment, including the 19-inch Aero Range wheels (which are the ones that reset the EPA range estimate to 431 miles per charge), a power trunk, auto-dimming, power folding heated exterior mirrors, intelligent micro lens array LED headlights with adaptive front lighting and automatic headlights with daytime LED signature, Speedform LED taillights, a power charge port door, rear fog lamp, powered illuminated door handles, a 34-inch glass cockpit display screen as well as a retractable pilot panel screen, 12-way heated power front seats, navigation, an audio system with HDRadio, SiriusXM satellite radio, wireless Apple CarPlay, wireless device charging, three-zone automatic climate control, a 60/40 split-folding rear seat with pass-through, selectable drive modes and five personalized driver profiles.

While that's a healthy standard feature list, our test vehicle did have several extra-cost options, including the 20-inch Aero Lite Stealth wheels ($1,750), a 21-speaker Surreal Sound Pro audio system ($2,900), Tahoe leather interior including 14-way power front seats with ventilation and a black Alcantara headliner ($3,000) the Comfort and Convenience Package including soft-close doors, power frunk, power rear and rear side window sunshades, four-zone climate control with heated precision wipers, steering wheel and rear seats ($3,000) and the Stealth Appearance Package ($3,000), which takes most bright trim and makes it black.

The bottom line on the window sticker? $92,800.

My Western Automotive Journalists colleagues and I weren't kidding and we weren't mistaken when we named the Lucid Air Pure Best EV and Best Overall Vehicle at Best of the Bay 2024.

The Lucid Air Touring thoroughly justifies its slightly higher price tag. It's everything we loved---and more.