Pros
- Looney Tunes fast
- Shockingly efficient (and not just for a 1,234-hp sedan)
- Insanely capable stability control setup
Cons
- Battery conditioning takes time
- Brakes can’t take the heat
- Lucid hasn’t figured out how to beat physics
Performance Vehicle of the Year is our youngest award, but this year’s field is already littered with greatness. Among the entrants are seven variants of vehicles that previously won Car, SUV, or Performance Vehicle of the Year. By all accounts, the Lucid Air Sapphire—the new 1,234-hp track-ready version of our 2022 Car of the Year—should’ve advanced to our finalist round. But as is often the case, PVOTY testing reminded us that perception rarely equals reality.
The Air Sapphire is made for blowing minds. Built on the Air sedan’s chassis, it swaps out the powertrains of lesser Lucids for a tri-motor all-wheel-drive system consisting of a motor up front and two motors out back. The permanent magnet units combine for a PVOTY-high 1,234 horsepower, 1,430 lb-ft of torque, and a staggeringly low 4.3 pounds per horsepower—a PVOTY best made even more impressive by the Air’s 5,335-pound curb weight.
Lucid didn’t just add more power and call it a day. It also swapped in massive 10-piston, 16.5-inch front and four-piston, 15.4-inch rear Akebono carbon-ceramic brakes to back up the regenerative system. It also binned the Air Grand Touring Performance’s suspension for one with stiffer springs, bushings, and dampers and recalibrated anti-roll bars. Its exclusive in-house-designed traction and stability control system is also new, capable of reading data from all four corners at 1,000 times per second, torque-vectoring, and virtually changing your perception of the Sapphire’s wheelbase, making it feel longer for straight-line stability and shorter for cornering agility.
Additionally, the Sapphire is fitted with a multitude of new track modes, including Drag Race (where full power is available), Hot Lap (1,001 hp), and Endurance (767 hp), plus a Conditioning setting that preps the battery to consistently deliver power. Aero revisions and newly developed Michelin tires that combine the Pilot Sport 4S (in their central blocks) and Cup 2R (in their sticky shoulders) round out the impressive package.
After a long wait for the 118-kWh, 900-volt battery pack to precondition, the Air Sapphire makes a good first impression on Chuckwalla’s 17 corners. “It’s absolutely incredible what this car can do,” features editor Scott Evans said. “The speed is reality-warping, and the grip is difficult to comprehend. The fact you can just floor it off every single corner and never worry about wheelspin or oversteer is amazing.” Deputy editor Alexander Stoklosa concurred: “The virtual wheelbase is transparent, but you’ll know it’s working when you fling the car through a chicane like a Porsche then get on the power through a gentle sweeper, where the Air is suddenly a super-stable, long-wheelbase sedan.”
That predictable performance encouraged judges to push the track-focused Air Sapphire until it suddenly became not so predictable anymore. “The brakes were reassuring for about 60 percent of my lapping; beyond that they began fading, or something about the motors’ regen changed to keep heat in check,” Stoklosa said. And, as executive editor Mac Morrison and others found out, the tires and battery conditioning are quick to go after the brakes go hot. “The brakes started to fade by the end of my second lap, and the Endurance mode that promises repeatable lapping went back into Conditioning mode around the same time—and this was after I waited for the car to complete its conditioning cycle for more than 20 minutes in the paddock,” Morrison said.
Evans, who previously spent time lapping a Sapphire on the straighter Sonoma Raceway, posits that owners will have to be choosy with which tracks they choose to lap. “On Chuckwalla, with its multiple big braking zones and long, late-apex corners, it kind of shows this car’s limitations fairly quickly.”
Although it was engineered with track duty in mind, the real world is where most Air Sapphire owners will uncork their cars. At those (hopefully) lower speeds and lighter duty cycles, the Lucid is sublime. Even so, with our driver confidence criteria in mind—not to mention its quarter-million-dollar sticker price and heat-soaking issues—we couldn’t pass this former OTY winner forward to our finalist round.
