Living With (and Roadtripping in) an Electric Car
TL:DR
Because EV prices are currently very competitive, we conduct a multi-week test of a Lucid Air Touring in order to determine the viability of living with an electric car on a daily basis.
The test includes city driving and a long roadtrip to rural California to test all aspects of EV ownership.
Unsurprisingly, the EV performs admirably around town. However, range decreases quickly on the highway, rural towns don’t always have reliable charging stations, and supercharging stations can have long waits, making a similar roadtrip challenging.
While EVs aren’t for everyone, the infrastructure has come a long way since these cars first gained mass-market appeal. Supercharging stations are also amazing, when unoccupied. We went from 20% to 80% charge in about 30 minutes (and our charger wasn’t even charging as fast as advertised).
If you can charge an EV where you live and don’t take long roadtrips often (or ever), an EV might be the right choice for you.
We really freaking loved the Lucid.
Background
Electric cars. Love them or hate them, they seem to have captured a lot of the spotlight in the automotive world in recent years and are certainly polarizing. Some folks love the utility of these vehicles, the efficiency, ability to save money on gas, and instant torque have undeniable benefits. At the same time, detractors dislike the large government incentives to move to electric cars, question whether these cars are as environmentally friendly as advertised, and swear that range anxiety is insurmountable and the electric charging infrastructure is not far enough along in its development.
We’ll leave the polarizing conversations to the keyboard warriors out there. However, prices of electric cars have been dropping precipitously for the last few months, and the value proposition when buying or leasing one of these cars has become impossible to ignore. One possible explanation is that early adopters of electric technology have already purchased these cars and demand has been slow to tick up among the more general populace. Concurrently, government incentives/mandates have led to a large supply being produced. When low demand meets high supply, prices have nowhere to go but down.
Is there a practical reason that more people aren’t making the switch to electric, or is stigma to blame? We figured the best way to find out was to do a test ourselves and get firsthand experience living with an electric car to fully understand the positives and negatives of ownership.
At Automagic, we tend to be agnostic when it comes to cars. We’ll recommend certain makes and models we love or caution against others that are known for problems. However, we mainly want to help our clients pick the car that works best for their needs. What better way to make an informed choice than experiencing what life is like when going electric. That’s what we told the bosses at least (we also secretly were really excited to spend time driving a cool, new car).
The Test
We wanted to keep the test pretty basic and focus solely on the experience of living with an electric car. We wanted more than just a “first drive” or even comparison style review common to many automotive magazines and websites. A few days with a car isn’t enough to truly get to know a car and its quirks (or watch the range gauge tick into the double digits when you know the nearest charger is 80 miles away). So, we organized a multi-week assessment to really put the electric car to the test.
We drove the car around town, on highways and backroads, and even took a thousand-mile roadtrip to ensure we had the full experience. We also tested the car in cold temperatures, since there has been some negative press about electric range and performance in winter conditions. We also did our best to focus on the experience of driving an electric car more than the car itself - so think of this more of as a car/lifestyle test than a traditional car review.
The electric car infrastructure (e.g., public charging stations) has developed substantially since the release of the Tesla Model S in 2012 (while other electric cars were released previously, the Model S is the car that we and many others credit with kickstarting the mass market appeal of electric vehicles). But has more than 10 years of development been enough to truly be “there”? (“There” being the point where the pros overcome the cons enough to make an electric vehicle a true alternative to fossil fuel)? We were keen on finding out.
The Car
For our test, we selected one of the best electric cars on the market - something that garners positive reviews, has sizable range, and is rippling with cool features. We wanted to test the pinnacle of electric performance to get a true sense of what going electric has to offer and preemptively stymie any complaints that the reason we don’t love electric cars is because we chose the worst one on the market (see boss, that’s why we couldn’t just rent a Nissan Leaf for this test).
We love the simple, yet techy interior of the Lucid.
Enter the 2025 Lucid Air. While not as well-known as Tesla, Lucid has stormed into the EV landscape by making some of the most efficient and luxurious EVs in the world. The Lucid Air is ranked as the #1 luxury EV by both Consumer Reports and Car and Driver. It also gained recognition as Motortrend’s 2022 Car of the Year.
We chose the middle of the range Air Touring model, largely due to its all-wheel drive layout (the cheaper Air Pure is only available in rear-wheel drive). We also have to mention how wild it is that this trim level is the middle of the range - the Air Touring has 620 horsepower, 885 lb-ft of torque and can whir its way to 60 mph in a face-melting 3.1 seconds (but doing so too often will certainly cut into the 406 mile range). The higher trim Air Grand Touring was a bit too pricey for our purposes and 819 horsepower seemed a little extreme, although we did wish on occasion for its larger, 118 kWh battery pack and 512 mile range. We won’t even talk about the top-of-the-line, $250k, 1,234-hp Air Sapphire (we’re still bummed the boss shut this down without even a discussion).
While the Air Touring starts at $78,900, our test car, our car came pretty heavily optioned, including Dream Drive Pro (with highway self-driving and an impressive sensor suite), glass roof, Comfort and Convenience Package (soft-close doors, heated steering wheel and rear seats, four-zone climate control, and power rear sunshades) which caused the MSRP to jump to around $90,000. That said, with current incentives on EVs, the price to lease a similarly-optioned Air Touring is only around $800 per month (for reference, a Chevrolet Blazer with a $41k MSRP had a lease quote of around $600/month).
What About Tesla?
We considered trying out a Tesla for this test. Tesla is the clear leader in EVs and has a more developed charging network than Electrify America and the mishmash of other EV charging providers. Also, Tesla uses a special plug for its chargers that is not compatible with the J1772 charging port that most other manufacturers use in their cars - so we effectively cut ourselves off from testing the Tesla charging network.
We went a different direction because we wanted to test the experience of owning an EV, generally, not a Tesla, specifically. If we had used a Tesla, most of our information would only be applicable if purchasing that brand. Dozens of other automakers are making EVs these days, so we wanted the information to be more universally applicable. It is also worth noting that Tesla has stated it will open up its charging network to other EV cars in the future (and Lucid, in particular, notes that it will offer Tesla compatibility by the end of 2025). If this happens, we just might have to run this test again to see if there is a meaningful advantage to this wider charging network.
Daily Driving
If you mostly drive in a city, never take long roadtrips (or have a spare gas car), and have the ability to get a home charger (or at least have a 240v outlet), it is extremely hard to argue with an electric car. EVs excel in traffic or when stopping frequently, as they recoup energy when decelerating. The instant torque is also sweet to use when darting around traffic or getting through a yellow traffic light (with an EV, all torque is available at all times - unlike a gas car, which has different amounts of horsepower and torque at different engine RPM). EVs also don’t have a transmission, so, when done properly, driving is smoother since you never change gears. That said, it takes some adjustment to drive an EV smoothly, since the cars accelerate so effortlessly. Also, a side-effect of the regeneration on deceleration is that when you let off the gas pedal, it feels like you have applied the brakes. It takes some getting used to, but after becoming acclimated, it is a really cool feature to drive with just one pedal in most instances (this also makes brake pads and rotors last vastly longer than those in a gas-powered vehicle).
In many cities, there are an abundance of public charging stations. You can often charge up while shopping at Whole Foods or waiting for a dentist appointment. However, if you are able to charge at home, this isn’t even necessary. We weren’t able to try it, but the Level 2 charger offered by Lucid can charge pretty quickly - up to 80 miles of range every hour. While this charger is expensive ($1,200) and requires an electrician to install it, Lucid is currently offering a $1,000 credit toward chargers. Alternatively, if you have access to a 240-volt outlet (what a washer or dryer uses), you can get up to 40 miles of range per hour with Lucid’s Level 1 charger. We only saw about 25 miles of range added per hour, but if you can charge overnight, this is more than enough for normal driving.
That said, living in an apartment complex can make an electric car much less feasible. A member of our team who lives in such a complex ran into a few issues. While the complex made two Level 2 chargers available to residents, the cost $0.32 per kWh was a bit on the expensive side. Several other tenants in the complex also own electric cars, making it difficult to reliably gain access to the chargers (our team member was lucky to charge overnight once but came home from work on multiple days to find both chargers occupied). Our brave team member was able to use a travel charger plugged into a normal, 120-volt outlet located elsewhere in the garage but could only add 4 miles of range per hour using this method (and worried that the landlord would have an issue with this if done consistently).
Our advice: don’t even consider shopping for an electric car until you are sure that you can charge it reliably at home (or somewhere near home). Otherwise, expect to plan your days around finding a public charger and leaving your car plugged in for several hours - or ensure you have a supercharger nearby that isn’t constantly occupied. As noted above, this part of the experience might be different for a Tesla owner. We just may have to get our hands on a Tesla in the near future and update our results if there are meaningful differences.
The Lucid
Also, while we promised to focus just on the EV experience, we can’t help ourselves. The Lucid is such an amazing car to drive around town. The interior of the Lucid is absolutely a dream (pun intended). The leather and other interior materials feel very high quality, the seats are extremely comfortable, and the ride is smoother than a Steph Curry 3-pointer. The amount of interior space reminds us of a clown car - the Lucid’s exterior dimensions are similar to a mid-sized sedan (think BMW 5-Series) but the interior space is closer to a large sedan (BMW 7-Series). Even when sitting behind a tall driver, rear seat legroom seems to stretch on endlessly.
The backseats in the Lucid are extremely comfortable with copious amounts of legroom. We also loved the black/tan contrast of our test car’s Tahoe interior.
Perhaps the largest compliment we can give to the Lucid is that, aside from EV-only features like one-pedal driving, lack of engine noise, and instant acceleration, it drives like a normal, gas-powered sport/luxury car. The steering feels precise and natural, with an adequate amount of feedback. One of our biggest gripes with every Tesla we have driven is that they feel unnatural and digital. We can’t seem to quantify why we have this impression, but everything from a Model 3 to a Model X feels like you are driving a robot.
Call us old school, but we also aren’t a fan of Tesla’s screen-heavy setup (which seems to be copied by more automakers with each passing year). Sure, it’s cool at first to control your whole car with essentially an iPad, but this gets old to us quickly. We enjoy dedicated buttons for basic functions - while driving, it frustrates us to no end having to sort through multiple menus on screen just to change the climate control settings or radio volume… not to mention dangerous to have your eyes off the road for this long. The Lucid strikes a somewhat happy medium. Still too much screen for us, but at least we could change the temperature and volume by button. We wish we could change the steering wheel and side mirrors with buttons, but once a driver profile is made, the Lucid uses facial recognition to automatically load your profile as you enter and adjust the seats, steering wheel, and mirrors to your individual settings. We were also a fan of how intuitive the Lucid is. It is bristling with technology but never overwhelmed even the least tech-savvy members of our team.
That said, we did have a few minor gripes with the car. A trim piece that spans the entire width of the dashboard reflects sunlight and glares onto the windshield. Anyone who has owned a car with a light-colored dashboard knows what we’re talking about. On the topic of windshield, we were pretty surprised that a heads-up-display is not even an option for the Lucid. For a car in this category (and price point), a HUD really should be standard.
Additionally, we had a few complaints about the car’s design/shape. To be more aerodynamically efficient, the car sits very low to the ground for a sedan. However, especially for tall drivers, this makes the ingress/egress process a bit challenging. Drivers and passengers must simultaneously hunch over while bending their legs to enter the car, which feels more like freefalling into the seat than entering a luxury sedan. More than one driver hit their head on the way in, but you get used to it after a few days. Finally, the pillars of the car (the metal segments that attach the roof to the rest of the body) are relatively large. This, coupled with the low-slung shape of the body can make checking blind spots and looking outward anywhere other than the front windshield a bit challenging. The car compensates with active blind spot monitoring and a host of cameras that engage at low speeds, but this also takes some getting used to.
Roadtrip
Finally, our roadtrip. Going in, we figured that an electric car would make oodles of sense as a city car, but how would our Lucid fare out on the open road? The answer is a resounding… “okay.” But more on that later.
We planned a route from Santa Monica, California to the foothills of Northern California, near Yosemite National Park. The hope was that this would test the limits of the car without too much danger of leaving us stranded in the middle of nowhere waiting for a tow truck. The route was about 350 miles one-way with a mixture of highway driving and back roads (once we veered off Highway 99 headed toward the mountains).
Brimming with a nearly full charge and an indicated 406 miles of range, we headed out of the city before the sun was up. With the roads nearly empty at that time of morning, we set the cruise control to nearly 80 miles per hour just to keep up with the flow of traffic and experienced Lucid’s self-driving capabilities for the first time. The system only works on highways and when the driver has his or her hands on the steering wheel. It worked well as long as lane lines were pretty clearly painted but didn’t do a great job slowing down in anticipation of a car changing lanes ahead of us, leading to a couple relatively dramatic deceleration events as the system suddenly realized a car was now right in front of us.
Things were going great at first, as we sipped coffee and reveled in the comfort of the interior and view out of the glass roof… until we realized just how quickly our range was dropping. We had expected this, since, on the highway, there are very few opportunities to regenerate charge while braking. However, it was still shocking to see 20 miles of range evaporate in 10 miles of driving distance at times. Slowing down to 70 miles per hour helped a bit, but not enough to make much of a difference. Our back-of-the-napkin calculations suggest that the range is under 300 miles when driving at 75 mph.
A bummer for sure, but something we hoped would not be a problem, given the number of supercharging stations on our route. However, we were visiting a remote town basically in the middle of nowhere. While it appeared that there were chargers available at our hotel, the receptionist mentioned that the chargers only worked periodically. We, theoretically, could stop to charge just once on our journey, but we decided to avoid the risk that the hotel charger was broken and stopped twice so that, in the worst-case scenario, we would have enough charge to make it from the last supercharger on the main highway to the town and back to the supercharger without too much stress.
Charging on our way up was largely a breeze. We were able to add nearly 200 miles of range in 30 minutes at our first stop and had similar luck at the next. While this is certainly longer than filling up with gas, we didn’t mind the time to grab a quick bite and use the restroom before hitting the road once more. Unfortunately, charging did highlight some foibles of the Electrify America charging network that have been discussed in detail in online forums. Nearly every charging station we visited had at least one charger that was broken. Further, while the chargers advertise a maximum 350 kW charge rate, the highest we saw in practice was 150kW (even with a nearly empty battery). And while we were lucky on our trip up, on our drive back, we had to wait between 10 and 30 minutes for a charger to open up. We didn’t mind waiting 30 minutes to get back on the road, but waiting an hour sucked, especially because the driver had to wait in the car to ensure they didn’t miss the opportunity when a charger became free.
After our second top-off charge, we were finally off the freeway and onto some gorgeous backroads that wind upwards in the California foothills. Our annoyance at having to charge twice quickly evaporated when we realized we had an open road and a full battery to play with. While the Lucid certainly is not a sports car (and isn’t necessarily even a true sports sedan), its low center of gravity (due to the battery pack installed under the floor) made it quite enjoyable on twisty mountain roads. Steering feel was nothing special and feedback was quite muted, which seems to be common in sports sedans these days, but the car had a surprising amount of grip even through tight corners.
The most obvious reason this car wouldn’t compete with a sports sedan is the seats. While extremely comfortable for long journeys, the seats lack almost all lateral support, leaving us sliding around nearly every time we turned the wheel. Throw some more supportive seats on the Lucid, and it could give even Germany’s best sedans a run for their money. But lateral support isn’t a factor when the road straightens out and the driver can hammer the throttle pedal. The car isn’t just quick off the line or around town… it demolishes any straightaway that comes its way. If one were to get stuck behind a train of three slow cars on a two-lane backroad, the Lucid can rocket from 60 to 110 mph in about as long as it takes you to read this sentence. Or *ahem* at least that’s what we’ve heard.
When we arrived at our destination, the small wine town of Murphy’s, California, our charging fears were realized. The charger at our hotel did not work, and the charger at a nearby sister hotel was also broken. While, according to the Lucid’s navigation interface, there were a few Level 2 chargers about a 30-minute drive away, we decided not to try this for a few reasons. First, we calculated that with the amount of driving we wanted to do in town, we should be able to make it back to the supercharger with a decent range cushion. Further, it would take several hours at the Level 2 charger to get a reasonable addition to our range and this, added with the roundtrip driving time, would cost us nearly half a day of our short, two-day trip. Finally, we could not find reliable information on these chargers online. If we were to arrive to find the charger broken, the added detour would have severely cut into our range cushion for arriving back at our last supercharger.
Worse still, the temperature forecast predicted cold (for California) overnight temperatures of around 21 degrees. This caused an overnight range decrease of 6 miles. Normally, this wouldn’t be a concern, but it can be disconcerting when every mile of range counts.
New lesson learned: EVs don’t do very well in small towns. Especially in the cold.
Our drive back to LA started very gingerly. We avoided any high-speed shenanigans and arrived back at the supercharger with around 40 miles of range on the clock. Crisis averted, although some blood pressure medication may be in order. The remaining portion of the drive was uneventful, and we arrived home in good spirits, the luxurious seats and smooth ride helping us all decompress as the miles wore on.
Verdict
Our test of the Lucid was an absolute blast but also very informative. The Lucid was a phenomenal vehicle and in the right circumstances (and with the proper amount of disposable income), each member of our team would happily own one. It is hard to imagine a better everyday commuter car, especially with the crazy high gas prices in California.
However, the list of “right circumstances” is a bit longer than we’d like. The quick depletion of range during highway driving and time and effort required to charge the car on the go mean that its utility has some pretty significant bounds. When chargers are along your route and readily available, driving the Lucid is a dream, but long waits at charging stations and limited charger availability in rural areas can quickly turn this into a nightmare (okay, we’ll stop with the puns).
If you are able to charge your vehicle at home, have a commute under 100 miles or so, and also have a gas-powered car in your household, it is pretty darn hard to argue with an EV. But be prepared for some issues if you plan to be on the road for several hours and many hundreds of miles. But we largely expected that going in. What surprised us is how far EVs have moved the needle toward being truly competitive with gas-powered cars.
Yes, we had some issues while dragging our poor Lucid on a long trip with limited charging options at our rural destination. But if you rarely (or never) took this kind of a trip, you would be hard-pressed to make the case for a gas car. On a shorter roadtrip (think Los Angeles to Palm Springs or even Dallas to Austin, for something closer to home for us), you could easily make the drive without stopping and just pick a hotel that offered EV charging. Even a much longer drive along a main highway (Los Angeles to San Francisco or Las Vegas, for example) can be achieved with just one stop at a supercharger. Assuming you find an open spot, charging for 30 minutes adds only 20 minutes or so to trip trip compared with a gas car. Depending on how often you take long trips, this difference is likely dwarfed by the time you save charging at home and not filling up at a gas station every week or two when commuting to work.
We also still think that we will always want an internal combustion engine in our sports cars and sports sedans. The level of engagement and “feel” of a gas-powered car still can’t be matched by EV wizardry. While leaving everything short of a Bugatti Veyron in the dust is extremely fun, we found ourselves missing the noise and drama of running up through the gears of our favorite sports cars. But once again, for most people most of the time, the utility of an EV is unmatched.
Our advice: think critically about how you want to use your vehicle, but don’t sleep on EVs. For many people, an EV can do most or all of what a gas-powered equivalent would while being cheaper to buy or lease (based on current prices and incentives), maintain, and charge.