Science

The All-Electric Lucid Air Hits 235 MPH in New Video

Lucid Motors

Car startup Lucid Motors won’t start producing vehicles for about a year, but it wants everyone to know that when the all-electric Lucid Air does hit the streets, it’s going to be fast.

On Monday, Lucid Motors released a video showing just what happens when you build an absolute beast of an electric supercar, strip it down to the bare essentials, take all the software speed limitations off of it and let it loose on a track at Ohio’s Transportation Research Center. The “Lucid Air Alpha Speed Car” hits a staggering 235 miles per hour, which is absolutely ludicrous for something that will soon be on the consumer market.

The company is currently taking $2,500 reservations for a Lucid Air, which is supposed to start production in the summer of 2019 (provided the company raises Series D funding and actually builds a production facility, that is). The full car won’t come cheap — pricing starts at $52,500. Chief Technology Officer Peter Rawlinson told Inverse in March that his company isn’t trying to make a mass-market Tesla Model 3 competitor; instead, it’s trying to blow the already stupid-fast Model S out of the water, promising speed, noise-cancelling luxury, and rapid battery charging.

Lucid debuted the Alpha Speed Car at the New York Auto Show, saying it would be using the vehicle for “high speed testing.” In a blog post, the company reported that it had been putting the vehicle through its paces since April. It first limited the car’s software to 217 MPH and equipped the car with a parachute in case it couldn’t slow down enough on the straightaway. But 217 wasn’t fast enough, and this month, Lucid went for 235. See it for yourself below.