Lucid Gravity has a unique rear motor to help maximize EV charging

Lucid started delivering the Gravity SUV to customers late last year but waited until now to reveal an interesting quirk about the new luxury EV that it says can help make charging better than ever before.

When it was first announced, Lucid said that the 450-mile, $94,950 Gravity SUV would come with an incredible 926-volt architecture, making it one of the few vehicles on the market to exceed the 900-volt Lucid Air or fast-charging 800-volt systems found in many Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis vehicles. That architecture allows Gravity owners to add up to 200 miles of range after just 12 minutes of charging — provided you have access to the right charger.

But as is so often the case, the right charger can be elusive. In the US, most DC fast chargers top out at 500V, with a handful of next-gen chargers supporting as much as 1000V — but those chargers are few and far between.

Now, Lucid said that its proprietary rear motor drive unit can help speed up the charging process, even when plugged into a charger with a smaller voltage. The proprietary motor can boost the charging voltage of 500V chargers to essentially match the 926V architecture of the Gravity, which Lucid says it can achieve without “the pack splitting solutions used by some competitors,” like the GMC Hummer EV and Tesla Cybertruck.

Those electric trucks use battery packs that are split in half or quarters, operating either in series or parallel to grant vehicles more flexibility, depending on what kind of charger they’re plugged into.

But Lucid opted to use a built-in booster, rather than go the split-pack route, in order to allow for the highest voltage charging that a station is capable of outputting. The company argues that this is a more efficient use of the charger’s electrical current that also generates less cable heat.

The Gravity’s booster-equipped rear motor allows it to “charge seamlessly at up to 400 kW on 1000V charging equipment and at sustained speeds of up to 225 kW on 500V architecture fast chargers, including Tesla V3 Supercharger,” Emad Dlala, VP of Powertrain, said in a statement.

And in case you forgot, the Lucid Gravity is one of the first non-Tesla EVs to get released with native NACS charge ports, meaning it can charge at Tesla Superchargers without the use of an adapter. (Hyundai also recently began delivering its native-NACS supporting Ioniq 5s to customers.)

Lucid is also including a NACS-to-CCS adapter as standard with all deliveries of the Gravity. This is useful since there are more non-Tesla EV chargers that can support vehicles with higher voltages than Superchargers. Lucid says its CCS1 adapter is the first one rated to charge at 500 amps with 1000V. The adapter enables charging at up to 400kW through the Gravity’s standard NACS connector with a CCS1 connector at a fast charger.