The 2025 Lucid Air Pure is a $69,900 luxury ride with room for tech tweaks

The all-electric 2025 Lucid Air Pure is a dreamy, sexy car, and no less luxurious for being the cheapest trim in Lucid’s Air range. I felt elegant and sophisticated while driving, but in a modest way – like I was wearing designer sweatpants.

But does fantasy have the same value? I rode the Air Pure for about 10 days on two different coasts to find out. And tl; dr: Yes, but only if these weather updates keep coming.

Air Pure is a technological dreamboat with many invisible “under the hood” – like an ultra-efficient electric motor. Its spacious, air-tight interior, combined with a top-notch sound system, simply puts you in a good mood.

This is the kind of car you want to spend time in, especially if Lucid continues to work to replicate its technological capabilities. The car’s many high-tech features justify its not-so-affordable $69,900 price tag. However, I found there was still room for improvement, particularly in Lucid’s voice assistant and DreamDrive advanced driver assistance system. The good news is that even these features have seen significant improvements previous iterations.

Nuts and bolts

With a range of about 420 miles and a single rear-mounted motor with 430 horsepower, Lucid Air Pure is an attractive alternative to Tesla Model Sit has a range of 402 miles with all-wheel drive and starts at $79,990. On one of my test drives, I comfortably traveled from San Francisco to Salinas and back, with additional city driving, without needing to recharge. Lucid provided TechCrunch with the Air Pure in both cases.

For fast charging, the Air Pure supports fast charging, covering 200 miles in just 15 minutes at charging stations from ChargePoint, EVgo, and Electrify America. Starting in 2025, Lucid owners will also have access to Tesla’s network, though an adapter will be required. When Lucid comes up next Gravity SUV While it will feature Tesla’s NACS port from day one, the automaker has yet to say whether future Air models will follow suit.

Sitting low on 19-inch wheels, the Air Pure is as aerodynamic as it looks with an impressive drag coefficient of 0.197.

When you approach the car, the electric motor and infotainment system automatically turn on and the washable door handles pop out. The front and rear bar lights are also illuminated in a fluid motion that sweeps outward like rippling water, setting the tone for a high-tech yet understated vibe.

Lucid’s signature lighting is instantly recognizable and the whole design comes together in a sleek, sophisticated ‘California New Money’ way.

Broad and technologically oriented

Sitting in the Lucid Air Pure is a sensory experience. With 40 inches of headroom and 45.4 inches of legroom, you feel like you can breathe in the driver’s seat, and I found myself drooling over the array of fabrics and textiles used in the interior. Even the oval-shaped steering wheel with ergonomic grip feels nice in the palms.

The Clean Air It has ambient noise levels like a soft electrical hum designed to mimic the sound of an engine, lending to its futuristic, spaceship vibe.

A 34-inch curved glass cockpit floats behind the helm with three distinct control zones. A touchscreen on the left controls quick access functions like the charging port and windshield defroster. The central display shows critical driving information – speed, gear, range and DreamDrive visuals. On the right, you’ll find connectivity and entertainment options, including Apple CarPlay integration, local navigation, media and communications.

Below that, a 12.5-inch Pilot Panel sits atop the center console. This vertical screen, which can be collapsed for additional storage, controls climate control, parking and driver settings. It also automatically displays a 360-degree camera view when navigating tight spaces.

Adjustments like the rear and side mirrors can only be accessed through a panel called the Pilot Panel, which some may hate. I didn’t mind since it was a one-time setup. Another highlight is the ability to adjust the lumbar support and upgrade to massager and ventilated seats for an extra $7,500 – a luxury I totally splurged on.

I appreciated Lucid’s decision to retain some physical control. Above the Pilot Panel there are touch buttons for adjusting temperature and volume. The steering wheel also has physical buttons to activate the advanced driver assistance system, change the song and activate the voice assistant.

The center console has two plugs for USB-C and Lightning cables and a sliding flap to keep things safe.

The rear seat was also generous with 39 inches of headroom and 37.6 inches of legroom, which friends and family in the back commented on. Rear-seat passengers also have their own small touch screen, where they can control things like heated seats, air temperature, and calling up or removing the sunshade.

Speaking of space, the trunk offers 22.1 cubic feet of storage, and the trunk has 10 cubic feet of space. Overall, the Lucid passed the Costco run test.

The Lucid Assistant – swing and miss

Lucid first launched the Pure series with Amazon’s Alexa-powered voice assistance, and it wasn’t very good. Over the past few months, Lucid has begun rolling out a replacement—a white-label version SoundHound AI. Lucid did not approve.

Lucid Assistant isn’t very good either. But is there really a car audio assistant that doesn’t? do you sometimes want to scream? Lucid Assistant can handle commands and answer questions about very specific car items. You can ask it about the weather, get directions to the nearest charging station, and tell it to turn on the heated seat.

As for the musical commands, they were limited. Assistant could turn on, say, Spotify and even play certain songs, but it often didn’t recognize what I wanted. I also couldn’t make him play some kind of music. For example, in a moment of panicked indecision, I asked him to play Top 40. Suddenly, Sublime’s “40 oz. “Freedom” was playing through the speakers. I’m not complaining, but it didn’t turn out the way I wanted.

While we’re on the subject of music, connectivity with music streaming services like Spotify was often spotty when the Dolby Atmos sound system somehow struck the perfect balance of bass, highs and mids. The connection dropped a few times, leaving me to fiddle with the pre-programmed Sirius XM options.

Local GPS and Lucid software

A few words about Lucid’s native navigation system with custom routing. Compared to Waze or Apple Maps, it doesn’t always take traffic into account, with ETA differences sometimes reaching 20 minutes.

It took some time for my eyes to adjust to how Lucid’s native system displayed itself. A lucid curve shows direct directions in the cockpit, with a larger map below on the Panel pilot, and I found my eyes jumping between the two screens.

Lucid software was perfect. Opening the trunk, unlocking the car, opening the charging ports, turning on the lights and seeing nearby chargers all worked as they should. It’s not as advanced as Tesla’s implementation, but I expect it to continue to improve.

Mature attitude

The Lucid Air Pure is low to the ground (and you really feel it when entering and exiting), giving it a centered grip feel during turns. Acceleration is solid, although you don’t get the same burst of acceleration as you would in a Tesla or Ford Mustang Mach-E. Still, the car is no slouch with a 0-60 mph time of 4.5 seconds. The suspension is also excellent – I hardly felt any bumps on the road.

The Air Pure has three drive modes accessible through the pilot panel: Smooth, Swift and Sprint. Smooth is comfortable for daily driving. The Swift gives it a bit more edge when you’re looking for a little fun or when you’re rushing down the highway, and the Sprint is designed for “advanced drivers” with “maximum power and torque for short bursts of intense performance.” I didn’t notice a huge difference between the modes.

For those who want more control over regenerative braking, you can adjust what’s in the driver settings, including turning on creep mode, which allows you to move without pressing the accelerator.

There are many cameras and sensors

The model year 2025 Lucid Air Pure comes standard with 24 sensors, including six cameras, infrared, ultrasound and radar used to power Lucid’s DreamDrive Premium ADAS. It includes features such as 3D surround view monitoring and blind spot display, lane departure warning, automatic parking, adaptive cruise control and a driver monitoring system for distracted and drowsy driving.

For an additional one-time fee of $2,500, Lucid buyers can upgrade to the DreamDrive Pro, which increases the number of sensors to 32, including solid-state lidar, radar, ultrasonic sensors and 13 cameras – and there’s highway assist. feature that combines lane centering and adaptive cruise control.

The benefit of purchasing this feature and its accompanying hardware is not what it can do now, but the promise it can do in the future. All of this suggests that while Lucid’s DreamDrive still has a ways to go, if you buy Pro ADAS, you’ll have all the right hardware for Lucid to add more automated driving capabilities via over-the-air updates in the future.

I found visuals like the 3D surround view monitoring, front and rear view visuals, and blind spot detection to be helpful, if not a little difficult, when maneuvering in tight spots or changing lanes.

I found Highway Assist most useful, especially in stop-and-go traffic on California highways. The feature is basically controlled for you as long as you stay in the same lane and preset speed and watch the distance. You can activate lane change assist on the highway by long pressing the turn signal.

Disabling Highway Assist was also simple and smooth. Just hit the brake pedal and you’re good – no weird jerks or hard transitions that were a problem with older software versions.

Clear vehicles equipped with standard DreamDrive or Pro provide drowsy and distracted driver warnings, which sometimes works for me. The Air Pure tracks the driver via an infrared sensor mounted on the top of the steering column, which takes the shape of your face and can tell if you’re not looking ahead. But it doesn’t look at your eyes like other driver monitoring systems. I guess it’s good for privacy and surveillance reasons, but bad for watching someone fall asleep at the wheel.

I tested fate a few times with the car in highway assist mode, even closing my eyes for 30 full seconds. I nodded like I was falling asleep, looked at my phone and looked straight out the window. Finally, the car hit me with an aggressive, repetitive warning telling me it had detected dangerous driving, telling me to take a break, and offering suggestions for nearby coffee shops. But these warnings came minutes after my experiments.

Finally, a Parking feature that will scan the area to park nearby. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it couldn’t see available parking spaces. I’ve never been able to get it to parallel park for me, but it’s managed to do a lot of parking, relying on space. This feature promises to pull out of Auto Park for you as well, but after checking left and right, my Lucid couldn’t quite figure it out.

An almost perfect HOME

I really loved the Lucid, and if TechCrunch paid me double my salary, I could see me and this car being very happy together. Especially if Lucid continues to iterate on the technology and make improvements like it has over the past three years.