Who Builds a Better Luxury EV: Tesla or Lucid?

We've laid eyes and hands on enough EVs from startups like Tesla and Rivian to know that first-time automakers don't deliver perfection on the first try, and our 2022 Car of the Year winner is no exception. After living with our long-term Lucid Air Grand Touring Performance for the past four months, we've uncovered a handful of details that fall short of modern car manufacturing's high standards. They got us wondering: How does a Lucid Air stack up against the competition when it comes to build quality?

To answer that question, we parked our long-term 2022 Lucid Air Grand Touring Performance next to its top rival, a Tesla Model S Plaid, for six hours of side-by-side inspection and professional nitpicking. This story summarizes what we found while looking at materials, design, fit, and finish to scrutinize build quality. We're not attempting to address mechanical and electrical durability here. For that story, as you did with our long-term Model S,  you'll have to come back once we finish our 12 months with the Air in late 2023.

While the Lucid and the Tesla are both expensive cars, the Air Grand Touring Performance sets higher expectations with its $180,650 price. The Model S we used for this story stickered at $143,190 when rolled out of the factory, but with Tesla's recent price cuts, the same car would cost just $117,630 today. Here's how they compare:

Tesla has long been shamed for shoddy panel gaps on its cars, but this particular Model S suggests those days might be in the rearview mirror. With tight, even gaps everywhere, this car's exterior fits aren't just good for a Tesla, they're great for any modern car. I pored over the gaps, hunting for something to write about, and only came up with a single quibble so trivial we couldn't capture it in a photo.

Most of the Lucid's sheetmetal comes together neatly, but there are a few egregious fits that need to be addressed. Check out how the trunk lid meets the driver's side rear quarter panel in the photo above. A pinky finger can fit in that gap at its widest point. It's also about twice as large as the same space on the opposite side of the car.

What's strange about this gap is that you couldn't make the trunk lid fit properly here even if you had the ability to move these components freely. If you equalized the passenger- and driver-side gaps—or if you magically pulled the quarter panels rearward—the body still wouldn't align with the trunk lid. The radiuses on the parts are completely different, which is why this gap is so uneven.

Our Air's charging port door is also canted so that one corner sits lower than the adjacent fender while another corner stands proud of the neighboring driver's door. This one is hard to unsee because you look at and touch this panel so frequently.

The whole purpose of trim is to create an attractive finished façade to hide all the ugly stuff. But when your trim is the ugly stuff, there's no hiding from it. There are two spots where our Air's gloss black window trim fails to do its job and instead calls Lucid's quality control into question.

Along the driver's side beltline, the trim on the front door sticks out and sits below the piece it meets up with on the passenger door. It looks even more dramatic than it does in this photo when you catch a glimpse of it in the driver's side mirror.

On the opposite side of the car, the trim that follows the top edge of the front passenger window doesn't meet up with the panel that holds the mirror. When we first took delivery of our Lucid, this corner of the window let in a small amount of moisture anytime we washed the car. That hasn't happened recently, but this trim piece is still on the list of things we're hoping the service center can address.

The Tesla surprised us with how well its trim fits, although the engineers have made things easier on themselves. With frameless windows, the tops of the Model S doors only have to meet up with a forgiving, squishy rubber seal. We did find a few small sections of weatherstripping around the doors that had dropped out of their channels. They were easily pushed back into place, but they don't feel like they'll be staying in there for long.

The Tesla outclasses the Lucid during an exterior walkaround, but the roles are reversed when you open the doors and look inside. Here, the differences aren't in how the parts are put together, but what parts are used in the first place. The graceful sweep of the Lucid's floating glass cockpit looks so much more upscale than the straight lines and hard edges that give the Tesla interior the sex appeal of an iPhone.

You can detect the difference in the materials, too, with the Air's plush carpet and supple Nappa leather feeling richer than the Model S's carpet and thin "vegan leather." Lucid designers have combined materials to layer on texture and style. The Tesla cabin, where spars of carbon-fiber trim are the only real design flourish, is spartan to the point that it cheapens the ambiance.

Inside the Model S, you get the impression many design decisions were made to cut costs or reduce assembly complexity. We're not just talking about the fact this Model S has half a steering wheel. Look at the door sills of the two cars as the best example. The Lucid's lower door jamb is trimmed out with molded plastic, as you'll find in most cars. Doing this well requires fitting a couple hard pieces together with tight tolerances. As the photo below shows, Lucid has left a lot of room for improvement where the two plastic panels overlap.

Tesla used to trim out the Model S's door openings in a similar fashion, but since redesigning the Model S in 2021, the carpet now runs up to the door seals with too-short rectangular aluminum sill plates centered in the openings. Carpet is a forgiving material to work with, requiring less precision than working with plastic, but this unusual design just looks cheap, like something you'd find on a boat rather than in a six-figure luxury car.

We found few actual quality issues inside the Tesla and Lucid. In the Model S, our only gripe is a section of rear-seat upholstery that shows a few ripples where it's not pulled tight.

The biggest problem in our Lucid's cabin is that none of the vanity mirror lights work, although they occasionally flick on for a moment as you lift the mirror cover. There's also a design flaw with those covers. Both Tesla and Lucid use the same cheap, flappy covers over the vanity mirrors, but the Lucid design engineer on the job must have been turned around by the flip-down visor, because the Air's are installed upside down. In the Tesla, gravity keeps the cover open, but the Lucid requires you hold it open with a finger to use the mirror.

Tesla has made major strides in improving its build quality over the ten years it's been building the Model S cars, which gives us hope that Lucid can follow a similar trajectory when it comes to panel gaps. On the other hand, we hope Lucid doesn't follow Tesla's lead in seeking out design shortcuts to work around the hard parts of building a quality car. The posh cabin is one of the Air's best attributes, and to water it down would dilute the experience.