lucid Motors has announced that it is making a sports car racing drive unit (MDU) for what it calls “the world’s leading line of single-seat electric racing cars.” For reasons we don’t know at the moment, Lucid does not use the Formula E name when talking about his motorsport achievements. Since there is only one “top-of-the-line electric single-seater race car”, we are really talking about the front engine used in Formula E 3rd generation car was introduced for this season at the opening race in Mexico. Until this year, the FE car only used a 200-kilowatt motor on the rear axle to turn the rear wheels. Gen 3 cars added the Lucid front mount. Despite the use of the word “drive”, this unit will not drive the front wheels — it is used as a generator providing regenerative energy up to 250 kW brake energy for the system. Combined with an upgraded rear-wheel drive unit to 350 kW, the Gen 3 cars boast 600 kW of power.
Lucid developed this unit in-house, its compact box housing the motor, inverter, differential and transmission. The entire kaboodle weighs 32 kg (70.5 pounds) and can produce 469 hp, giving it a power density of 14.7 hp/kg. It’s the same maximum horsepower produced by the rear-drive motors that each manufacturer in the series can choose to make or purchase themselves. So yeah, a team can buy Lucid’s MDU and stick it on the back, like Venturi Racing used to sell Its FE powertrain goes to Dragon Racing and Mercedes-Benz. At the front, however, the unit is limited to 250 kW of power production, or 268 hp.
The automaker’s chief executive officer Peter Rawlinson said “the new sports car powertrain builds on powertrain technology developed in-house by Lucid and has been proven on the road in every clean Air“, reversing the conventional hype about putting race-track technology to work. The MDU uses high-voltage continuous wave coils and micro-beam cooling as the motor in the manufacturing process. Air. Rawlinson also hinted at the possibility that “some of the technical advancements introduced could appear on future Lucid road cars.”
The track is almost as lackluster in Lucid as it is in porsche or Ferrariin spite of. Lucid started as a company called Atievawas founded by former Tesla vice president Bernard Tse with entrepreneur and investor Sam Weng in 2007, focusing on the battery software and packages. Atieva rebranded to Lucid in 2016, the Atieva name was used for Lucid’s technology arm. Rawlinson became CEO and CTO of Lucid in 2019, replacing Weng, while Tse remained Atieva’s CEO. The official name of front drive unit supplier is Atieva. Have all of those?
More importantly, the new MDU news means that Lucid has swapped its supplier status with FE. Lucid worked with McLaren Applied Technologies and Sony to supply a 54 kW battery pack for Formula E 2nd Generation cars, which will enable them to go full races starting in 2018 and wise said, “You’ll also find similar race-proven technology from Atieva in its Lucid Air.” So the Air has always been a bit of a mismatch, now Formula E is getting a bit of an Air-y.
We’ll find out how attractive the current Air sedan can be when the Air Sapphire starts shipping later this year. It would be a shame if standalone EV modding skins couldn’t get this new MDU in their own builds.
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