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The Lucid Air Has Just Set a New Range Record
But will this new Guinness World Record stand for long, at the rate that automakers are chasing range?
Exceeding your electric vehicles' EPA range is easy enough. First of all, roll up the windows, turn off the A/C, and find a string of country roads with a speed limit around 40 mph or so. As EVs consume less energy at slower speeds, finding that sweet spot of making progress while not dying from boredom or (more importantly) heat exhaustion will easily yield numbers north of those advertised on the Monroney.
Of course, turning the A/C off in the US during a variety of seasons is gambling with disaster, because one of America's best-kept secrets is that it's actually a tropical country. And in the wintertime, even with the AC off the cold will rob your battery of range, as hypermiling in cold temperatures poses its own challenges.
But Lucid found a sweet spot in hypermiling its Lucid Air Grand Touring sedan between St. Moritz, Switzerland, and Munich, Germany, and in the process set a Guinness World Record for the longest journey by a production EV on a single charge, covering 749 miles, or 1205 kilometers.
And it didn't involve risking dehydration or heat stroke.
But it did involve some serious elevation changes that appear to have helped quite a bit.
St. Moritz is positioned some 5,910 feet above sea level, and the route to Munich involves a gradual descent to just above 1,700 feet above sea level.
So gravity assist is not just a technique for space probes in interplanetary travel.
Lucid also elected to take the scenic route from St. Moritz, it seems, instead of the quickest dash, allowing it to cruise at fairly tame speeds for far longer than necessary. So it's probably not the way you'd take between the two locales if you were in a hurry.
On paper, the Lucid Air Grand Touring has a range of 960 kilometers in the WLTP cycle, or 596.5 miles, so it managed to beat it by almost 150 miles.
The previous record for a production EV on a full charge stood at 649 miles, so Lucid was able to eclipse it by an even hundred miles.
In the process, this particular production Lucid also beat Mercedes' record of 747 miles set in the EQXX prototype back in 2022, after a previous record of 626 miles in the same car earlier that year.
The route Lucid took involved alpine roads, secondary roads, and even highways, which are usually the nemesis of hypermiling.
"This range record represents a significant milestone—it's yet another clear demonstration of the technological edge that defines Lucid," said Eric Bach, senior vice president of product and chief engineer at Lucid.
Behind the wheel of the record-setting Lucid was London-based entrepreneur Umit Sabanci, who in 2024 had set another record involving a Lucid for the most countries visited on a single charge in a production EV. That record-setting trip saw the Lucid travel through nine countries on a single charge.
"When I completed the nine-country journey in 2024, it was just the beginning," said Sabanci. "This new achievement takes that journey even further."
Still, we have a feeling that Sabanci's latest record won't stand for a long time, given the pace of the current range wars among pricey EVs.
Will the range wars keep going between the top luxury automakers for a while longer, past the 500-mile mark, or will they cool off at some point? Let us know in the comments below.