Better Luxury EV: Tesla or Lucid?

Better Luxury EV: Tesla or Lucid?

Better Luxury EV: Tesla or Lucid?

The 2022 Car of the Year winner, the Lucid Air Grand Touring Performance, has been compared to its top rival, the Tesla Model S Plaid, for six hours of side-by-side inspection and professional nitpicking. To answer the question, we parked our long-term 2022 Lucid Air Grand Touring Performance next to its top rival, a Tesla Model S Plaid, for six hours of side-by-side inspection and professional nitpicking. This story summarizes what we found while looking at materials, design, fit, and finish to scrutinize build quality. Tesla has long been shamed for shoddy panel gaps on its cars, but this particular Model S suggests those days might be in the rearview mirror. Most of the Lucid’s sheetmetal comes together neatly, but there are a few egregious fits that need to be addressed.

Check out how the trunk lid meets the driver’s side rear quarter panel in the photo above, which is twice as large as the same space on the opposite side of the car. The Air’s charging port door is canted so that one corner sits lower than the adjacent fender while another corner stands proud of the neighboring driver’s door. There are two spots where the Air’s gloss black window trim fails to do its job and instead calls Lucid’s quality control into question. On the driver’s side beltline, the trim on the front door sticks out and sits below the piece it meets up with on the passenger door. On the opposite side of the car, the trim that follows the top edge of the front passenger window doesn’t meet up with the panel that holds the mirror.

The Tesla surprised us with how well its trim fits, although the engineers have made things easier on themselves. With frameless windows, the tops of the Model S doors only have to meet up with a forgiving, squishy rubber seal. We did find a few small sections of weatherstripping around the doors that had dropped out of their channels. The Tesla and Lucid are two cars that differ in their interior design. The Lucid’s floating glass cockpit looks more upscale than the Tesla’s straight lines and hard edges.

The Air’s plush carpet and supple Nappa leather feel richer than the Model S’s carpet and thin “vegan leather”. The Tesla cabin, where spars of carbon-fiber trim are the only real design flourish, is spartan to the point that it cheapens the ambiance. Inside the Model S, design decisions were made to cut costs or reduce assembly complexity. The Lucid’s lower door jamb is trimmed out with molded plastic, while the Model S’s door sills are trimmed out with molded plastic. These differences in design make the Tesla outclass the Lucid during an exterior walkaround, but the roles are reversed when you open the doors and look inside.

The most important details in this text are that Lucid has left a lot of room for improvement where the two plastic panels overlap, and that Tesla used to trim out the Model S’s door openings in a similar fashion, but since redesigning the Model S in 2021, the carpet now runs up to the door seals with too-short rectangular aluminum sill plates centered in the openings. Quality issues were found in the Model S, with a section of rear-seat upholstery showing a few ripples. The biggest problem in the Lucid’s cabin is that none of the vanity mirror lights work, and there is a design flaw with those covers. Tesla has made major strides in improving its build quality over the ten years it’s been building the Model S cars, which gives us hope that Lucid can follow a similar trajectory when it comes to panel gaps. However, we hope Lucid doesn’t follow Tesla’s lead in seeking out design shortcuts to work around the hard parts of building a quality car. The posh cabin is one of the Air’s best attributes, and to water it down would dilute the experience.

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