We got an up-close look at Gravity with Lucid Motors’ SVP of Design and Brand, Derek Jenkins
This week, Lucid Motors invited Electrek to an exclusive ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrating the opening of Phase 2 of its AMP-1 facility in Casa Grande, Arizona. Part of the festivities included a factory tour, an interview with CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson, and our best look at Lucid’s upcoming Gravity SUV to date. Senior Vice President of Design and Brand Derek Jenkins walked me around Gravity and shared some insights into what went into this unique electric SUV.
Yesterday’s visit to AMP-1 was filled with excitement as local politicians joined CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson on stage to cut the ribbon on Phase 2 – a 3 million-square-foot expansion that moves all of Lucid’s production and storage into one facility, adds a stamping machine, and includes a second body shop where Gravity – the American automaker’s second flagship model will be built.
Gravity has been a long time coming, as we first caught wind of the SUV in 2020 during the premiere of the Air sedan when Lucid briefly teased it. Not different from CEO Peter Rawlinson’s mention yesterday of a “mid-size” Tesla Model 3 and Model Y competitor in the works as Lucid’s third model.
Details of Gravity picked up in November 2022, when we saw some interior images ahead of the start of reservations. A year later, Gravity was officially unveiled with a slew of exciting design upgrades, a 440-mile range, and a front end that has earned the new term “frunking.”
Now, with the next phase of Lucid’s AMP-1 facility open for business, Gravity will soon begin scaled production. On-site in Arizona, I had the opportunity to kick the tires on the SUV and interview Lucid’s SVP of design and brand, Derek Jenkins.
Gravity is Lucid’s next chapter en route to “mid-size”
Gravity is still very much a higher-end luxury SUV competing with the likes of Mercedes-Benz, but this EV represents more than just Lucid’s next fancy model. It’s a culmination of design elements that counter the nuances and other lessons learned when building the Air.
Furthermore, Gravity offers a premium-level “yin” to the Air’s “yang,” as a bookend to the ultra-luxe EVs and a segue into Lucid’s more affordable “mid-size” and beyond – if it can stay afloat long enough to reach that milestone. That said, a lot is riding on the success of Gravity, but Lucid’s team is confident that consumers will… gravitate toward it.
We’ve already covered the SUV’s specs up and down since last year, so it was refreshing to see, touch, and even climb into the third row of Gravity and get design insight directly from one of the top minds behind it – Derek Jenkins:
Gravity had its own unique set of attributes and challenges over Air to really create the next generation of SUV and excel at all of our unique attributes of aerodynamics, efficiency, space utility, flexibility, road worthiness, and degree of off-road capability.
Jenkins assured us that Gravity will be the most aerodynamic SUV when it comes to market. While Gravity shares several design elements with the Air, Lucid has introduced some new and exciting components you may or may not have noticed. Of course, you’ve noticed the frunk seat, but the SUV’s cockpit is a completely new approach compared to the sedan.
Whereas the driver’s display sits within the dashboard in the Air, about 35% of it can be blocked from view by the steering wheel. Jenkins told us that really bothered him, so they moved the curved display up below the sight line and into full view and implemented a different steering wheel that is shorter but still rounded at the bottom you can observe in the images above.
When production begins later this year, Lucid Gravity will join a short but growing list of larger electric SUVs promising 6-7 seats by way of the third row. For some vehicles, the third row is a gimmick that can barely hold children; for others like the Kia EV9 for example, it’s still tight but doable. Jenkins told us that space optimization and delivering modular cargo space in addition to a third row were vital when designing Gravity:
The A-post is really far forward, the driver and passenger are pushed forward, and that’s what enables this really large cargo and people area. As we connected more and more with, not only Lucid owners but family SUV owners, second row, third row spaciousness as well as cargo flexibility and overall cargo is paramount. It literally trumps everything.
So we spent so much time optimizing the package, learned a lot from Air and stretched it. You end up with this very long sleek cabin, short nose, and as you come toward the back of the car, there is a lot of taper in the cabin while still preserving really really good third row headroom. Making a proper third row was a big big part of this.
The Air sedan is already touting the largest frunk in the business, and the Lucid Gravity takes flexible cargo to another echelon. The rear well stowage inside the trunk is enormous, and the ability to fold down the passenger cabin’s seats entirely flat is a huge bonus.
Derek told me he could fit an 8.5-foot surfboard in the trunk diagonally, and Peter Rawlinson told me he hopes future owners use it to transport 2x4s some day. We’ll see about that, but there is no denying the space optimization in Gravity throughout. Have a look:
Those second-row seats fold flat as well. Lastly, while sitting in the Lucid Gravity with Derek, I asked what he thinks US consumers will be most excited about when they get to see this SUV up close like I did:
I think it’s two things. First, I think the cockpit will be a fresh experience for most people because it’s different from most of our mainstream competitors and I think the steering configuration is unique. I also think the cargo experience is going to be awesome. Not just for micro cargo, but also frunk, trunk, seat flexibility, and then human space.
Being able to have a car with this level of performance, agility, capability on-road and off-road, and yet still be just under the Cadillac Escalade in terms of overall interior volume, which is just crazy. That car is four feet longer than this thing. It not only has to look great and drive great, but it has to do the job. i think people are going to be astounded here because thaty’s what’s important in the segment.
Our next step will be to get behind the wheel of the Lucid Gravity and see what it delivers from a performance standpoint. That opportunity is already in the works, so expect a full report very soon.
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Tesla shareholders will vote on whether to invest into xAI, Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s private company, according to a post by Musk on twitter today.
Elon Musk is not just the CEO of Tesla, the electric car company that you may have heard about from time to time in Electrek’s coverage, but several other companies as well. And, famously, Musk companies often share resources – there has been much talk of incorporating SpaceX technology into Tesla vehicles, and putting xAI/twitter’s “MechaHitler”…. er, I mean, “Grok”…. feature into Tesla cars, among other collaborations that have happened over his various companies’ histories.
And today, Musk made it official that he will seek greater collaboration between three of his companies: Tesla, xAI, and twitter, in the form of an investment into xAI by Tesla.
The situation is a little more complicated than that, though.
Tesla is a public company, owned by shareholders. Musk is the largest shareholder, but only owns around 12% of the company himself.
This is a different situation than xAI, which is a private company, owned by Musk. While there are other investors, he can exercise much more direct control over the company, and doesn’t have to put big decisions up to a vote.
One of the recent decisions he made with xAI was to purchase twitter in March. You may say, “wait, I thought he bought twitter back in 2022?,” and you’d be correct. Musk purchased twitter for $44 billion in 2022, which was widely agreed to be far too high a price, and then rapidly saw the company’s valuation drop to under $10 billion.
Then, in March 2025, Musk had xAI purchase twitter in an all-stock deal, valuing twitter company at $45 billion – again, far too high of a valuation, but considering he purchased the company from himself, he could set the price at whatever he wanted.
The move was widely considered to be a bailout of twitter, and the numbers involved considered arbitrary, perhaps partially to help save face for Musk after he made one of the worst business deals of all time.
Now the two are the same entity, and it seems clear that he would like to bring Tesla into the fold, in some way or another.
Musk has already improperly used resources from Tesla, a public company, to boost xAI and twitter, his private companies. Last year, he gave up Tesla’s priority position for highly sought-after NVIDIA H100 GPUs, instead shipping those GPUs to xAI and twitter. Tesla could have used these GPUs for training its FSD/Robotaxi systems, which Musk has claimed is the most important thing to Tesla’s future, but instead graciously sent them to his other company that used them to, uh, train a bot to say Nazi stuff apparently.
xAI has also poached talent from Tesla, multiple times, showing how Musk is using Tesla as a farm team for his private company.
So it hasn’t been a secret that Musk would like to use public money to bail out his private companies, as he’s been setting the stage for for a while now.
Musk has previously “discussed” getting Tesla to invest in xAI in the past, but the idea was never made official until today, when Musk said that he will put the idea to a shareholder vote.
In response to one of his superfans asking for the the opportunity to waste money on an overvalued social media app (which would mark the third time it has been overpaid for in as many years), and the backend fueling “MechaHitler,” Musk said this:
Tesla traditionally holds its annual shareholder meeting around the middle of the year, so if it were a normal year, this shareholder vote might be imminent.
But it’s not a normal year, as just last week Tesla announced an exceptionally late shareholder meeting, pushing it back to November, the latest it has ever held the meeting.
This means that Musk will have around four months to campaign for this idea – something that he’ll perhaps have more time to do, now that he’s no longer cosplaying as a government official.
We don’t know what the structure of the deal might look like yet, but Musk has been clear in the past that he wants more shares in Tesla. After selling many of his shares in order to buy twitter, he later complained that he doesn’t feel comfortable having less than 25% of Tesla. Given that his recent xAI/twitter deal was an all-stock deal, Musk could attempt to fund any investment of Tesla into xAI via shares, giving himself more Tesla shares in exchange for the company gaining a portion of xAI. Though to get him to 25% voting shares in Tesla, that would require either an enormous valuation for xAI, a small valuation for Tesla, or purchasing a large percentage of xAI (or, perhaps, all three, given how much higher TSLA’s valuation is than xAI’s).
We may however have a hint as to how that vote will go, because the last time Musk campaigned for a clearly terrible idea, Tesla shareholders ate it up.
In mid-2024, Musk ended his yearslong absenteeism at Tesla in a flurry of activity, hoping to persuade enough shareholders to vote for his illegal $55B pay package.
That flurry involved firing 10% of the company (supposedly in order to save money – though Tesla’s earnings have dropped drastically since), including important leadership and successful teams, which caused chaos with Tesla’s projects. He also pushed back an all-important affordable car project (which we’ve still heard nothing about) and held Tesla’s AI projects hostage while shifting both resources and staff from Tesla to his private AI company, even as he claims that AI is the future of Tesla.
In the end, these bad decisions worked, and shareholders voted to give their bad CEO his $55B pay package, even though it was later ruled to still be illegal.
So it looks like we’ve got another campaign coming up, and if last time was any indication, expect some really bad decisions along the way. It worked last time, didn’t it?
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The off-highway equipment experts at Perkins and McElroy have teamed up to develop a plug-and-play battery electric power unit designed to help equipment OEMs and upfitters to seamlessly transition from diesel to battery electric power.
Designed to occupy the same space as the companies’ diesel-engined power units, Perkins dropped its new battery power unit into the similarly new McElroy TracStar 900i pipe fusion machine (specialized equipment used to join thermoplastic pipes like HDPE or polypropylene by heat-welding them end-to-end to form a continuous length pf pipe).
Perkins’ battery electric power unit replaces the company’s proprietary 134 hp, 3.6 liter 904 Series Tier V diesel engine, enabling units that are already deployed to be quickly upgraded to electric power – and helping trade allies and development partners to easily retrofit existing equipment in order to add zero-emission options to their operational fleet.
“We’re actively helping customers navigate the shift in power system requirements, with a range of advanced power systems including electric, diesel-electric and alternative fuel compatible engines,” says Jaz Gill, vice president, global sales, marketing at Perkins. “When it comes to the innovative fully integrated battery electric power unit, it can be ‘dropped in’ to a machine to replace a diesel engine. The system consists of a Perkins battery along with inverters, motors and on-board chargers – all packaged up into a compact drop-in system to support seamless transition from diesel to electric for our customers looking to make that move.”
McElroy believes that an electric, emissions-free power unit like this one will open new opportunities and applications for its customers.
“Their team has done a phenomenal job of integrating their battery electric system into our TracStar 900i,” explains McElroy President and CEO Chip McElroy. “We’re really excited to see what the market thinks about this concept.”
Development of the battery electric powered pipe fusion machine was completed in about nine months. Future Perkins-powered electric equipment running the 904 diesel (small excavators, telehandlers, pumps, and gensets) could be developed even more quickly. You can find out more in the company’s promo video, below.
Perkins electric power unit
SOURCE | IMAGES: McElroy, Perkins.
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British ultra-luxe brand Bentley is teasing the upcoming, first-ever all electric model that will take it into the 2030s with a new concept car inspired by the iconic 1930 “Blue Train” Speed Six coupe – and it looks fantastic!
More than any other brand, Bentley was defined by its engine. For decades, in fact, the only meaningful mechanical difference between a Rolls-Royce and a Bentley was the 6.75L twin-turbocharged V8 engine under the flying B hood ornament.
That all changed at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Rolls-Royce was acquired by BMW, while Volkswagen took the reins at Bentley, setting both brands on distinct paths. Now, without its own engine, Bentley faces the challenge of proving to discerning buyers that its cars justify a premium over its mechanical cousins at VW, Audi, and Porsche. That’s why the company is looking to it pre-Rolls merger past, all the way back to the legendary 1930 “Blue Train” Speed Six coupe.
Bentley Blue Train EXP 15 concept
“Bentley’s then-chairman Woolf Barnato had a Speed Six four-door Weymann fabric saloon by H J Mulliner, which he used to race the Blue Train in 1930,” explains Darren Day, Bentley’s Head of Interior Design. “Meanwhile, he had a unique one-of-one Speed Six coupe being built, with a body by Gurney Nutting. Even though the coupe wasn’t finished when the race took place, it’s that car (the coupe) that’s become associated with it and has since become an iconic Bentley. What we were influenced by is the idea of a three-seat car with a unique window line and super slick proportions used for grand tours.”
The EXP 15 concept car features a unique, three-door, three-passenger layout under a sweeping, dramatic roofline lifted from the 1930 tourer. “The seat can rotate and you step out, totally unflustered, not trying to clamber out of the car like you see with some supercars,” continued Day, before dropping the biggest hint yet as to who they’re building the car for. “You just get out with dignity and the Instagram shot is perfect.”
Bentley EXP 15 interior
While almost no technical specs have been revealed other than “full electric,” Bentley says its new concept’s innovative interior layout allows passengers to stretch out in comfort alongside accessible storage compartments that can house a bar, hand luggage, or even pets. The EXP 15 even offers tailgate seating for outdoor parties or suburban soccer games.
But, while the new concept is tall, Bentley hopes it manages to offer the commanding driving position and comfort of an SUV while giving off the “vibe” of a classic grand tourer – something Bentley thinks could be the next wave of the luxury car market.
“The beauty of a concept car is not just to position our new design language, but to test where the market’s going,” offers Robin Page, Bentley Director of Design. “It’s clear that SUVs are a growing segment and we understand the GT market … but the trickiest segment is the sedan because it’s changing. Some customers want a classic ‘three-box’ sedan shape, others a ‘one-box’ design, and others again something more elevated. So this was a chance for us to talk to people and get a feeling.”
As before: no specs, no range estimates, and no promises about if and nothing definitive about when the oft-promised all-electric Bentley will finally bow – but this is certain: when it does arrive, it will be big, brash, and fast.
Electrek’s Take
Now that SUVs are everywhere and in every segment, automakers are desperate to explore or open new niches, hoping to find that next “SUV-like” growth segment. As weird as the three-door, three-seat EXP 15’s interior layout is, you have to admit that it’s different. And, for a vehicle that spends 90% of its time with just one person inside it, it might be more than practical enough.
Let us know if you think Bentley has a winner, or just another concept car gimmick on its hands in the comments.
SOURCE | IMAGES: Bentley.
he 30% federal solar tax credit is ending this year. If you’ve ever considered going solar, now’s the time to act. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.
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