As we all know, the most important factor to consider when buying a three-row minivan substitute isn’t how comfortably it fits your family, how much room there is for all your kids’ stuff, or how affordable it is to put in your driveway. No, what really matters is how quickly it can run the quarter-mile, pull a U-turn, and then run the quarter-mile in the opposite direction. Automakers haven’t always understood that fact, but thankfully, there are now two that do — Lucid and Rivian.
You’ll have to give up your beloved internal combustion engine if you want a minivan substitute that makes the R63 AMG look slow, but if you love acceleration, that may not be so bad. Not when the Lucid Gravity Grand Touring makes 828 horsepower and 909 pound-feet of torque, and the tri-motor Rivian R1S makes 850 hp and 1,103 lb-ft. According to their respective manufacturers, that’s enough power for the Gravity to hit 60 mph in 3.4 seconds, while the R1S only needs 2.9 seconds to do the same thing. They also each cost…yeah, we don’t talk about that in polite company.
So on paper, you’d be an idiot to buy anything other than the Rivian, since it’s significantly quicker. But does that acceleration advantage hold up over the all-important quarter-mile? Our friends at Edmunds recently put together a little U-Drag competition to find out.
Which SUV is quicker?
While the Rivian makes more power than the Lucid, if you dig a little deeper, it starts to look like things might not be as one-sided as they initially appear. That’s because, while the Gravity weighs in at a porky 6,122 pounds, the R1S is even heftier, coming in at 6,795 pounds. Do a little math, and you’re looking at 7.99 pounds per horsepower for the Rivian and 7.39 pounds per horsepower for the Lucid. That, of course, doesn’t account for torque, and you also can’t forget the all-important U-turn between the two quarter-mile races.
Once you throw the U-turn into the equation, you have to consider braking, as well as…I’m just messing with you. The Gravity wins. Twice in a row. Easily. And that’s even with the Rivian having the advantage off the line. The Rivian hit 60 mph in 3.0 seconds, while the Lucid did it in 3.5, but that advantage nearly disappeared over the course of the quarter-mile, with Rivian running it in 11.3 seconds compared to the Lucid’s 11.4. However, the Lucid pulled 1.05 g, beating the Rivian’s 0.93-g best, and that cornering advantage ended up being a big contributor to the Gravity’s overall win with a time of 33.2 seconds versus the R1S’s 34.5-second time.
That’s not quite as quick as the Lucid Air Sapphire’s time (a car Lucid has informed me it’s happy to put up against the Corvette ZR1 or any other car, if that automaker is brave enough), but it’s only 0.2 seconds behind the Air Grand Touring and 0.1 seconds ahead of the Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing. Your move, Cadillac?
