EVs Break Records at Goodwood, but Where's the Love?

• Electric vehicles dominated the hillclimb stage at this year's Goodwood Festival of Speed, with the previous record broken by.82 of a second.

• Lucid's Air Grand Touring Performance sedan (pictured above) took the title of fastest production car with a time of 50.79 seconds.

• Enthusiasm for EVs was mixed, with exotic and race-spec cars garnering more attention than ultra-high performance sedans like Lucid's Air or the prototype Polestar 5.

Sprawling over a Royal property, the Goodwood Festival of Speed would be as unorthodox of a space for a car event as the mind could conjure. If it weren't for the decades of hillclimb history, the ordained estate doesn't appear to be the place for raucous motors and drift-car figure-eights. And yet the venue and event are steeped in enthusiast tradition, one that has accounted for years of manufacturer reveals and historic motorsports news.

The nature of tradition is inherently stagnant and the Goodwood Festival of Speed has largely maintained the same format since its inception. Sure, the rally stage ran backward this year but the significant changes year-to-year are the vehicles running up the hill. A Bomb Pop painted Ferrari 296 GTS and preserved BMW E30 M3s run minutes after the Beast of Turin and Wayne Rainey's return to the motorcycle. That is to say, a band of familiar faces and cars you may never see again populate the paddocks and leave their mark on a hillside full of fanatics.

"It perplexes me," said Peter Rawlinson, CEO of Lucid Motors, in an interview with Autoweek. "I 'm a complete dyed in the wool petrol head, and I don't miss the note of an exhaust pipe at all." He went on to say, "The visceral experience of driving an EV is unsurpassed."

Of course, that's easy for the CEO of a halo EV company to say. But the Lucid Air is a special car, one that defies its own visual presence and market competitors. Enthusiasm for EVs, or a lack thereof, seems to partially be centered around packaging. The McLarens and Corvettes of the world are flashy, angular, and aggressively designed to instill a sporty sensibility. And while packaging is vital to CEOs like Rawlinson, the Lucid Airs and Polestar 5s of the world look like slightly elevated luxury sedans while quietly beating a McLaren up the hill.

Discussing the beginnings of Lucid, Rawlinson referenced his time at Lotus and his desire to make smaller cars. Packaging EV componentry into compact spaces is no small task, especially when you're attempting to make a supercar level of power. "If we can miniaturize the powertrain, we can make a bigger car on the inside, smaller car on the outside," Rawlinson explained. "It was like, 'Well, hey, why don't we miniaturize the electrification so we can do something new?'"

The result is a hyper-sedan that exhibits the driving performance of something much smaller and more expensive. The $179,000 Grand Touring Performance model is aggressively priced, but it is comparatively cheap to those looking to buy 1000 hp. Power numbers and 0-60 times aren't the indicators of a good car and the high-powered Lucid trims have faced criticism that the power levels may not be usable. And weighing in at over 5000 pounds, it's a heavy sedan by all accounts.

These sorts of judgments are fair, especially in a world where fledgling car companies all claim to have reinvented the blueprint of a centuries-old machine. However, Lucid actually has created something semi-original and largely competitive, if at times similar to Tesla. Forgetting the drivetrain for a moment, any world of car enthusiasts should be captivated by the tale of a 1000-hp, five-seat, all-wheel-drive sedan that outruns their favorite supercar. And the Air has practicality, to boot.

Still, Lucid Motors has encountered significant challenges in its journey to deliver the Air sedan. Production numbers have fallen severely short of claimed targets. Prices recently climbed about 12%. Interior instrumentation was subject to recall. It's also unclear if a more accessible, mass-market car is on the way. At this point, the company is maxing out its current capacity while building an additional production facility—a recipe for slowed delivery times.

Perhaps the biggest problem of all is reception. At Goodwood, EVs were appreciated as performance machines but still were somewhat ignored. The record-breaking Speirling and drifting Rimac Nevera elicited roaring cheers from the crowd, spectators craning their necks to catch a fleeting glimpse of the EV powerhouses. Race cars, like the First Corner FC1X, were nearly as loud as some production combustion-engine cars—a combination of pitched electric motors and transmission whine.

The Lucid, however, was hard to catch. It was very fast and in a clean, undramatic manner. Yet, the announcers rarely caught the lightning-quick sedan until it was partially up the hill. The car ran inconspicuously in the First Glance group, a run dedicated to new and upcoming models or technologies, without much auditory warning. Throughout the property, audiences seemed similarly underwhelmed, with many joking that they didn't realize anything went by.

Such is the paradox for EV companies catering to enthusiasts. While they can create a car that is the fastest on the hill, with ungodly power and sharp handling, an uphill battle against tradition persists. Making noise, through heightened engine revolutions and mechanical gear changes, is central to Goodwood and to car enthusiasm as a whole. Lucid loses out in this sense, fighting a century-long tradition. As the status quo of the auto industry shifts, tire squeal and motor whine may become the sounds of future automotive generations to come. Cruising at 100 mph in silence doesn't sound so bad either.