There's a new Lucid Air model on the horizon and it will debut in just two days' time at the Monterey Car Week. It might be the most exciting Lucid EV to date if our interpretation of the official teasers released on its social media accounts is correct.
In the first teaser posted on Twitter on August 15, Lucid shared a photo of CEO Peter Rawlinson on the assembly line at the company's Casa Grande, Arizona factory surrounded by employees smiling enthusiastically. All of them, including Rawlinson, had three fingers up in the air.
Then on August 16, the EV startup posted a short animation of three cylindrical objects rotating and spinning. The parts resemble a portion of the stator, which is an important component of an electric motor. The video was accompanied by the caption: “Three is a magic number. See why at The Quail. 8.19.22."
Taking all this into account, we're pretty sure Lucid is teasing a tri-motor variant of the Air luxury sedan, which would give the EV even more ludicrous (pun intended) performance than the now sold-out 1,111-hp Air Dream Edition Performance or the 1,050-hp Air Grand Touring Performance.
Come to think of it, during development of the Lucid Air, the company showed off a tri-motor version of the sedan that seemed capable of very impressive performance. At the time, the EV startup said the two motors on the rear axle were capable of delivering a combined 1,300 horsepower (969 kilowatts), with the front motor adding an unspecified amount of power.
In 2020, the EV maker sent a tri-motor Air prototype around Laguna Seca and managed to set a lap time of 1 minute and 31.3 seconds, getting quite close to the Tesla Model S Plaid's 1:30.3 record on the same track. Lucid also showed the tri-motor Air prototype covering the quarter-mile in 9.245 seconds at 157.26 miles per hour, although it remains to be seen whether the production model will be just as quick.
We'll probably learn more about that on August 19, when Lucid will hopefully reveal a production version of the tri-motor prototype at The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering. In an August 11 press release, the company said that will be the venue for the "global debut of a new vehicle variant that could only come from Lucid." They certainly have our attention.
