Photo by Andrew Hawkins / The Verge
The Lucid Air has been in the works for a very long time, nearly a decade by some accounts. The first time I rode in the 1,000-horsepower electric sedan was in Las Vegas in 2017, when Lucid Motors had an engineering prototype on hand at the Consumer Electronics Show. I rode in the Air again just this past Monday, in a near-final version of the massive, roomy vehicle. Suffice to say, it was better the second time around.
In the four years between then and now, the EV startup struggled to raise money and very nearly went out of business. But thanks to a timely investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, in which it put up its own intellectual property as collateral, and a recent SPAC deal that will leave the company with $4.4…