Yahoo Autos Lucid Air EV Promises World-Beating 0.21 Coefficient of Drag
Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson promises that wind-tunnel testing has confirmed his bold claim, but admits that you’ll need to wait for the specially designed aero wheels to be available to achieve the headline 0.21 coefficient of drag.
Lucid has tested four cars in a wind tunnel owned by Windshear, but this was the first time they brought in a full-size prototype.
Lucid’s lead aerodynamicist tells C/D that the Lucid Air electric sedan was designed from the get-go to be this aerodynamic, and further tinkering may improve the number.
Car companies—especially ones that have yet to produce a vehicle—love to tout the ways that they will beat the established competitors. Case in point: Lucid Motors' recent announcement that a prototype of its upcoming all-electric Air sedan was verified as having a coefficient of drag (Cd) of 0.21 based on tests conducted in an independent wind tunnel run by Windshear. This incredibly low, incredibly slippery number makes the Air "the world’s most aero-efficient luxury car," Lucid claims. So we had to ask what's behind this number and just how it relates to the vehicle that customers will be able to buy, once the Air goes on sale.
A little primer on Cd: It's a dimensionless figure used to quantify how efficiently a vehicle passes through the surrounding air, and a lower figure is better. Vehicles will measure differently in different tunnels, and the tunnels owned by automakers are almost always busy with engineers working on actual projects. This makes it difficult to find direct comparisons between competitive models tested in the same tunnel. That's why, in 2014, we did one ourselves, rounding up five vehicles for a wind-tunnel comparison test to measure Cd and frontal area. The Tesla Model S was our winner, with a 0.24 Cd.
