The Lucid Air Sapphire is the quickest car you can buy for a quarter-million dollars, and it’ll outrun cars in the quarter mile that cost orders of magnitude more. It’s even quicker than the dragstrip-oriented Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170. In a recent test by Hagerty’s Jason Cammisa, the Lucid turned an impressive 9.002 second run at the Famoso dragstrip in California. Wait, isn’t that just a tick behind Dodge’s claimed 8.99 seconds for the Demon 170? In real life with a real driver behind the wheel, the Demon managed a slower (but still mind-meltingly quick) 9.721 second pass.
Run after run, the electric super sedan gave the supercharged monster a proper old-school shellacking.
The wonder of gasoline-powered performance has not only been matched, but it’s been bettered. At the drag strip, anyway. When it comes to going fast in a straight line, you just need a Lucid Air Sapphire and an empty stomach.
Perhaps even more interesting is how wide the gap between these two cars gets when the road surface isn’t “prepped” with VHT. Even with sticky Mickey Thompson drag radials (versus the Lucid’s street-ready daily driver Michelin PS4S tires), the Demon 170 just can’t get the power down to the ground on standard asphalt. At the end of the drag strip, that means the Demon 170 is a full two seconds slower than the Sapphire. The gap gets closer with VHT on a prepped track, with the Demon dropping 1.5 seconds from its timeslip, but that’s not enough to catch America’s new king of straightline speed.
