Review: Lucid Gravity 2026

North Americans love their SUVs. Minivans, not so much—despite wanting ever-larger vehicles that hold more people and more stuff. They also increasingly like electric cars, though not at the most optimistic rates projected a few years ago, in part because EVs are still pricier to buy.

All of which leaves the 2026 Lucid Gravity, the second vehicle from startup Lucid Motors, in a peculiar position. It’s a battery-electric crossover utility with an EPA range of up to 450 miles, a prodigious 120 cubic feet of interior volume (including the front trunk) for the five-seat model, and a second row that folds flat. Want sixth and seventh seats? A third row that vanishes below the cargo floor takes away only 5.6 cubic feet.

There’s fast charging that, under ideal circumstances, can add 200 miles of range in 11 minutes. But the launch Grand Touring model of the Gravity starts at $95,000—and our test car, with 10 separate options, stickered at a cool $125K.

The Gravity hardly has the appearance of the rock-climbing, desert-crossing, rough-and-tough SUV. Instead, the 2026 Gravity is a sleek, relatively low, highly efficient, smartly engineered and packaged people carrier that has elements of minivan to it—or, even worse in US terms, a “wagon.” It’s the antithesis of the “electric Land Rover” ethos of the Rivian R1S, which has all those butch points but weighs 1,000-plus more pounds.

WIRED spent a day and more than 100 miles with a recent 2025 Gravity Grand Touring up-fitted with all changes found in the 2026 models now rolling off the lines at Lucid’s expanded factory in Casa Grande, Arizona. We were greatly impressed.

“Boost” to Charge Fast at Superchargers

Lucid has long been known for the elegance of its compact, efficient power units. Combining an electric motor of up to 1,000 horsepower, its power electronics, and a final-drive unit in a package little bigger than an Army footlocker is far from easy. As it turned out, the Gravity got a new rear power unit at the last minute.

While the basic shape of the Gravity was fixed a couple of years ago, the EV world was rocked when Tesla agreed in May 2023 to let Ford EVs charge in its “walled garden” Supercharger network. GM followed two weeks later. By autumn 2023, it was evident that any future EV sold in North America would have to incorporate the NACS charging connector sooner or later.

In early 2024, Lucid decided to build NACS into all Gravitys from the start. That brought them face-to-face with a charging problem: Lucid uses a high-voltage battery pack (926 volts), one of the few makers (Porsche and E-GMP models from Hyundai-Kia are the others) to have batteries running at more than 800 volts. But Tesla’s Version 3 Superchargers, the bulk of its network today, use a low-voltage, high-current system. Hyundai owners have reported charge rates as low as 50 to 80 kilowatts in cars capable of 300 kW or more.

So Lucid developed a proprietary “boost” technology—it declined to give WIRED precise details—to raise incoming 500-volt power to match the pack’s 926 volts. It says only that it uses the rear motor unit to do so, presumably through one of the windings acting as a DC-DC inverter. The boost function delivers up to 225 kW from a v3 Supercharger.

Lucid also moved the Gravity’s charge-port door from the left-front fender to the left rear, just as it is today on Tesla cars—allowing the Gravity to use current Tesla v3 Superchargers with their characteristically short cables. While two preproduction cars at the drive event had both ports, any Gravity you can buy comes with a NACS connector—along with a CCS-NACS adapter. And, laudably, the company worked with Tesla to do the software integration that allows proper Plug and Charge at Tesla chargers: plug in the car, walk away, and all the authentication and billing is done on the back end, automatically.

Keeping 12-Volt Batteries Healthy

Another electrical trick: The Gravity uses a “Micro DC-DC converter” to trickle-charge the Gravity’s 12-volt batteries from the traction battery rather than recharging them only periodically. That greatly extends the life of any 12-volt battery, a century-old technology not designed for regular deep discharges before recharging. Why two 12V batteries? For redundancy, so it can park safely at the side of the road even if one battery is damaged in a crash.

Lucid says the Gravity’s sensor suite—12 exterior and two interior cameras, 5 radars, one lidar, and 12 ultrasonic sensors— will “enable Level 3 autonomy,” it’s still rolling out certain of its premium ADAS features via over-the-air updates. The full feature set of DreamDrive 2 Pro is planned for a fall delivery; that includes not only hands-free enhanced cruise control, but also the unique “Curb Rash Alert” to sound an alarm if a driver is in danger of scraping a wheel on a curb.

Not a Butch SUV, but What Is It?

EV design sometimes takes advantage of the packaging opportunities, with a short beveled nose and a longer cabin (see the Tesla Model 3, Jaguar I-Pace). Other makers (like BMW) shy away from anything that suggests their EVs aren’t “regular” cars, meaning proportions that could house a combustion engine up front. Lucid sits firmly in the first camp. The rear doors are huge, access to the third row is as easy as any vehicle we’ve tested, and a 6'6" colleague was able to climb into that third row and sit with some semblance of comfort.

It’s all about the drag, or more precisely, lessening it to every last possible degree to wring greater range out of a given battery capacity. Lucid quotes a drag coefficient of 0.24, remarkable for a vehicle this large—though Cd figures from different makers can’t be compared due to varying methods of measurement. Combined with a remarkably light weight of just 6,000 pounds (thanks to aluminum construction), the slippery design produces an efficiency of up to 3.6 miles/kWh (450 miles from a 123-kWh pack). It varies with wheel size (smaller is better) and passenger configuration (five seats is better than seven).

Drives Smaller Than It Is

Our vehicle, the seven-seat model with 20- and 21-inch wheels (front and rear), showed just 2.22 miles/kWh after an energetic drive through the foothills of Los Olivos, California. But our driving was hardly typical of the wealthy suburbanite-family duties the Gravity will most likely see.

We did some acceleration runs, took it briefly to extra-legal speeds on limited-access highways, and cycled regularly among the three drive modes: Smooth (normal), Swift (sport), and Sprint (fastest). Smooth gave a slightly busy ride, while Swift felt more controlled and precise. Sprint was the most “German” of the three. We mostly toggled between the last two, but the differences among them were more subtle and much less pronounced than in other EVs WIRED has driven.

The optional rear-wheel steering makes the Gravity easy to place, and it drives smaller than its dimensions might suggest. At 198 inches long, it’s the same size as a Rivian R1S or BMW X7, but drivers will be aware of its 87-inch width (mirror to mirror) when facing oncoming traffic on narrow mountain roads.

With a total power output of 618 kW (828 hp) and torque of 909 pound feet, acceleration from 0 to 60 mph is quoted at a remarkable 3.4 seconds in Sprint mode. We didn’t do repeated stopwatch testing, but that seemed close to the mark, albeit delivered in a remarkably unfussed manner. Tesla’s characteristic, explosive kick-you-in-the-kidneys thrust off the line is absent here.

Being an SUV in America, of course, the Gravity has to tow. It’s rated for up to 6,000 pounds, with Tow Mode and vehicle-control software that takes into account trailer behavior. If you do what Lucid showed in its publicity shots and tow a smaller Airstream behind a Gravity, that range of up to 450 miles may be cut in half while towing, if other EVs are any guide.

Off-roading? Ride height varies from 5.3 to 9.3 inches, courtesy of the air suspension. The highest number approaches Subaru levels, but it’s hardly the 16 inches of a GMC Hummer EV in Extract mode. While Rivian took reporters rock-climbing over 12,000 feet for its debut launch, the Lucid team let reporters do doughnuts in soft sand (with the traction control off) and autocross the big seven-seater through a sandy paddock course (it did quite well for its size, but it’s no Miata).

More than a year ago, I drove an alpha-build Gravity and was impressed by its road behavior. Last week, we learned its powertrain came from an earlier Lucid Air and wasn’t the one used in production Gravity models on sale today. That speaks to Lucid’s relentless spirit of refinement and improvement—specifically, a new rear power unit in just a year.

Processor Headroom

The Lucid team laid out the software-defined vehicle platform it used for the Air and how it had been updated for the Gravity. One aspect is the use of the latest Nvidia Orin-X processor, with 512 GB of onboard storage. The current Gravity code base occupies roughly 100 GB, said acting digital vice president JP Gaultier, leaving plenty of room for the substantial code to achieve higher levels of autonomy.

Another advance: The Gravity is the first Lucid without old-style fuses, meaning devices in sockets. While the Air mixed some of those with electronically resettable e-fuses, the Gravity has solely e-fuses. Since they never have to be removed, the vehicle needn’t include access panels or fuse boxes at all.

Verdict

The Gravity lets Lucid offer a “Tesla done right” SUV to an audience that may be tiring of the latter company’s increasingly stale lineup. In our one day, the Gravity established itself as a smartly designed, extremely capable, and eminently pleasant place to rack up the miles.

Sure, if Lucid had it to do over again, it may have started with an SUV. But the Air luxury sedan was a great proof of concept, and it put the company on the map as a serious new entrant in the EV startup space—albeit a US company now largely funded by Saudi backing.

The worry about the Gravity is that it’s not a classic SUV, and it offers only minimal off-road chops. It’s almost a European style “people mover,” or the dreaded M-word: minivan. Both those vehicle types are far more practical than taller, tougher-looking SUVs, even if US buyers often don’t accept that.

Lucid said other, less expensive trim levels of the Gravity will follow the high-end Grand Touring we tested. The Touring will arrive by the end of this year, and a rear-wheel drive Pure model and a supercar Sapphire trim may follow, to parallel the Air lineup.

To let more shoppers in on the clear virtues of Gravity, bring on those less-expensive Gravity models—and then, smaller, more affordable Lucids, ASAP.