With a one-foot rollout, the Lucid Air Sapphire managed to reach 60 mph in just 1.77 seconds
April 17, 2024 at 21:08
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- A customer-owned Lucid Air Sapphire has run the quarter-mile in a record-breaking 8.930 seconds.
- With a one-foot rollout, it managed to reach 60 mph (96 km/h) in just 1.77 seconds.
- Lucid’s work to make the car easy to drag race has been successful, and sets the Air Sapphire up as a reliable giant-killer.
We’ve seen Ben “The Stig” Collins run some impressive quarter-mile times in a Lucid Air Sapphire in official videos, but now that customers have their hands on them, we can validate those results with some independent runs, which is exactly what the DragTimes YouTube channel has done.
In a new video, the channel takes a consumer-owned Air Sapphire to a prepped drag strip to see what it can do. And what it can do is impress. In back-to-back runs, the car completes the quarter-mile in just over 8.9 seconds with an exit speed of 154 mph (248 km/h).
More: Watch The Lucid Air Sapphire Destroy Hypercar Drag Strip Records
That matches Lucid’s prediction perfectly, and the first run set the world record for the quickest production sedan on earth, with a quarter-mile time of 8.930 seconds. Moreover, with an industry standard one-foot rollout, the car managed a 0-60 mph (96 km/h) time of just 1.77 seconds.
Without that rollout, it took the car 1.92 seconds to reach highway speeds, but that’s still highly impressive. With that, the driver, Brooks Weisblat, was subjected to 1.5 G of acceleration, pushing him back into his seat and struggling to keep himself off the headrest.
“My face really felt like… crazy, crazy G forces on there. That’s — wow. This thing is nuts,” he says. “There is a noticeable difference between this launch and the Tesla [Model S Plaid’s] launch. It’s just crazy.”
But the Air Sapphire isn’t just good at going forward. This video reveals how well-thought-out the car is. For example, its big carbon ceramic brakes are very good at bringing it to a stop from 154 mph time after time, which is important, even on the drag strip.
It’s also simple to set up for the race, featuring a track mode that offers drivers options for endurance or drag racing. Once they have selected what they want to do, the battery pre-conditions itself to give it the best chance possible of achieving its full potential. Additionally, car-to-car charging facilitates easier battery refilling at the strip, while allowing for pre-conditioning without lowering its state of charge. The results speak for themselves.
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