For the Love of Assholes

2023 Lucid Air Touring

(This listing is from Cars & Bids.)

The great thing about a vehicle segment that’s less an automotive category and more a new branch of luxury consumer appliances is that it follows the depreciation curve of luxury consumer appliances. Technically an EV like this is a car, but really you should think about it more like a toaster that has a touchscreen on it, very sleek and probably not super long for this world.

That said, there’s exactly one target demographic companies have in mind when they design something like this, and that target demographic…is assholes.

It might be $8 blue check assholes who thought they would be robotaxi-ing to cover their lease payments by now.

Or it might be assholes who take a deep cleansing breath every time their actual-goddamn-bird-chip keyfob noise echoes across the newly-gentrified city block where their hot yoga studio is. Somewhere a kid across an ocean takes a similar cleansing breath while climbing out of a cobalt mine, probably not headed to yoga class.

Or just assholes who think that the biggest problem with the Hummer was that it was too light and couldn’t hold its own against a McLaren F1 in a drag race.

But no, none of that sounds much like you, gentle enthusiast. You seem more like an asshole who wants an outrageously comfortable sedan after an entirely different asshole eats $50,000 or so in depreciation for the privilege of driving this thing for 3,000 miles.

Which is understandable.

Because while only people with touch-screen toaster money can afford to just obliterate cash to the degree necessary to enjoy one of these, it turns out that you can get in the game downright reasonably if you grab one like this and, ideally, move it along to some third kind of asshole in a couple of years before the 34-inch glass cockpit system fails and reveals a Linux backend held together by spaghetti code and electrical tape, or Lucid gets acquired by Nestle and turned into a limo service for overseas commodities cartels (that no longer include North American service centers in their business plan).

So yeah. You don’t want to be today’s seller who claims to be taking a five-figure bath because his wife just can’t quit third-row Korean SUVs, and you probably don’t want to be the next in line who’s going to buy it for $15,000 before eventually towing it to an electronics recycling event outside of Best Buy ten years from now.

Either way, you’ll turn more heads than any Tesla besides the one that looks like a dishwasher which hasn’t finished rendering, all while talking up the “French-inspired design” as if the Air was conceived by engineers scribbling on napkins outside a Paris cafe with the ghost of Armand Peugeot and not crapped out by an aerodynamics algorithm like someone typed “slippery sedan with roof weirdness” into ChatGPT and immediately manufactured the results.

As for that roof weirdness, the car is two-toned—silver and silver. It’s a Lucid thing. Look at the pictures more closely and prepare yourself for explaining to people that yes those are different colors and yes that’s on purpose.

Killer deal, though, potentially. This isn’t like getting last year’s iPhone for half off. It’s like getting this year’s iPhone before the original owner made it all the way out of the mall.

But the bottom line here is that even though the world is a disaster right now, it isn’t bad enough that you’re going to be watching 3,000 mile Lucids bounce across the auction block every other week. Probably just buy this one.

(By the way, kind of like that Hummer, the Air does hold it’s own against a McLaren F1 in a drag race. This is completely unnecessary, but admittedly dope. Enjoy.