Lucid Motors announced that its Air owners will gain full access to Tesla’s Supercharger stations in North America starting July 31.
But there’s a big caveat.
Owners of the newly available Lucid Gravity already have access to Tesla’s Supercharger network as the vehicle is equipped with a native NACS charge port.
However, the Lucid Air, Lucid’s luxury electric sedan, is still equipped with the CCS1 port and requires an adapter to utilize the Supercharger network.
Lucid announced today that Air owners will gain access on July 31:
All Lucid Air owners, regardless of model or model year, will gain access to the North American Tesla Supercharger network starting July 31, 2025. Unlike the Lucid Gravity, with its native NACS charge port and high-tech boost charging capabilities, Lucid Air uses a NACS adapter available from Lucid to plug into compatible Tesla Superchargers (V3 and above). The DC NACS to CCS1 adapter will be priced at $220 US excluding taxes.
The only problem is that Air owners are going to be limited to just a 50 kW peak charge rate using this adapter. Lucid wrote in the release:
Using this solution, the Air can charge at up to 50 kW and gain up to 200 miles of range per hour of charging, giving owners additional peace of mind while on the road. With the adapter, owners will be able to initiate charging on Tesla Superchargers via the Lucid App, with a credit card saved to their Lucid Wallet.
This will significantly limit the network’s usefulness for Air owners and increase traffic due to longer charging sessions. The reason for the limitation is currently unclear.
However, many Lucid owners are likely to choose stations where they can take advantage of the 300 kW peak charge rate of the Air.
Emad Dlala, Senior Vice President of Powertrain at Lucid Motors, commented on the announcement:
“In addition to offering the longest-range electric vehicle available, Lucid is committed to offering our customers seamless and wide access to public charging. Access to the Tesla Supercharging network for the Lucid Air is yet another major milestone.”
Electric automakers have all been transitioning their vehicles to the NACS connector in North America to standardize charge connectors and take advantage of Tesla’s Supercharger network, which is the most extensible and reliable EV fast-charging network in North America.
Author: Fred Lambert
Source: Electrek
It’s really disappointing that Fred finds that “The reason for the limitation is currently unclear.” Including the reason in the article itself would have been a great educational opportunity, which based on the comments is sorely needed.
In the early days of DCFC all chargers provided up to 400v, and cars had 400v systems. Then about a decade ago the CCS standard was revised to require 1000v for high power chargers (100kw and above). This enabled the development of fast charging 800v cars like the Hyundai/Kia/Genesis EGMP vehicles, Lucid Air, and Porsche Taycan.
However, these cars still needed to charge at the older low power 400v chargers. To do that, a 400v-800v converter was built into the car. This takes the 400v from the charger, upscales it to 800v for the battery. But the electronics to do this gets more expensive and heavy depending on how much power can be converted, so only the minimum necessary converter was included. The Lucid only can convert 50kw, the EGMP cars are limited to 97kw.
Meanwhile, Tesla just kept using 400v, even with 250kw/325kw chargers. When these 800v cars were designed, no one anticipated that they would ever need to connect to these Tesla chargers, so why spend money on higher power converters? Then everything changed, and now we have cars that were never designed to plug into high power 400v chargers. So they do work, but with speed limitations. The ultimate fix will be 1000v chargers from Tesla, starting to come later this year.