Lucid Motors' Gravity SUV can have Tesla charging in-built | TechCrunch

Lucid Motors is only a few months away from lastly launching its electrical SUV, and the corporate now says the upcoming automobile — dubbed Gravity — can have Tesla’s North American Charging Normal (NACS) constructed proper in, making an adapter pointless.

Lucid introduced the information forward of a deliberate “Know-how and Manufacturing Day” occasion at its Arizona manufacturing unit, the place the corporate will go into better element about the way it has designed and can construct the Gravity. The corporate previously announced that it will begin providing adapters for its present EV, the Air, in 2025 and that it deliberate to combine NACS charging in future automobiles.

Making the Gravity as enticing a product as doable is essential for Lucid, which has struggled to develop gross sales of its Air sedan at a time when SUVs are dominant in North America. The corporate has repeatedly tapped Saudi Arabia, which is its majority proprietor, for recent funding to get the Gravity into manufacturing. Most not too long ago Lucid introduced in August that it was taking as much as one other $1.5 billion from the Kingdom.

Constructing NACS into the Gravity is one more signal of how extensively the automotive business is adopting Tesla’s charging normal.

Tesla first introduced plans to open up the know-how — which grants entry to its widespread Supercharger community — again in 2022. Since then, primarily each main automaker and EV startup has introduced plans to both provide adapters to their clients that allow their automobiles plug into the community, or to construct the tech proper into future automobiles.

One in all Lucid’s closest friends within the EV startup world, Rivian, introduced earlier this yr that its upcoming mass-market R2 SUV will include the NACS port. However that automobile gained’t be prepared till 2026. Within the meantime, house owners of Rivian’s R1T pickup and R1S SUV have to make use of adapters, very similar to the opposite legacy automakers. That course of has been sluggish, as a New York Instances article not too long ago pointed out, following Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s resolution to dismiss practically the entire firm’s Supercharger workforce earlier this yr amid a a lot wider restructuring.