Munro & Associates, an organization specializing in reverse engineering and teardown benchmarking, just lately disassembled the battery of a Lucid Air Grand Touring. Its engineers carried out a teardown to the cell degree to grasp how Lucid Air batteries are designed, and the way the luxurious sedan achieves its outstanding EPA-estimated driving vary – between 384-516 miles, relying on the variant.
Lucid Air’s decrease variants – Air Pure and Air Touring – get an 18-module battery pack whereas the Air Grand Touring will get a 22-module battery unit, in line with Munro Reside, the corporate’s YouTube channel the place the outcomes had been posted. The absence of the 4 further modules within the Air Touring – mounted beneath the rear ground – helps free footwell house for the rear occupants.
The decrease trims get a 92-kilowatt-hour battery, whereas the Grand Touring will get a 112 kWh unit, as per the Munro engineers. It’s the latter that they disassembled to check its internals. Buckle up, as a result of the next info would possibly sound like a science class, and is revelatory of how technologically superior the Lucid Air battery is.
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The modules are mounted on an epoxy glass fiber composite ground, a cloth that reportedly offers nice thermal insulation and corrosion resistance. For structural functions, the ground has machined aluminum castings on the entrance, rear, and sides. One other aluminum casting divides the battery on the middle into two sections.
Every module is split into 10 elements, with 30 cylindrical cells for every half, totaling 300 cells per module. By this calculation, a single Lucid Air Grand Touring battery would have 6,600 cells.
What makes this battery distinctive are the three sheet molding compound (SMC) lids, one other compressed high-strength materials that contributes to holding the pack collectively, as per the engineers. These supplies are held collectively by structural adhesives, an enormous proportion of which made it troublesome for the engineers to teardown this Lucid Air battery.
The battery administration system (BMS), its brains in easy phrases, is built-in right into a printed circuit board meeting (PCBA), which as per the engineers was the most important that they had seen. The Lucid Air’s battery had not one however two such brains – two BMS circuit boards with an unusually giant footprint. A Tesla PCBA compared was a lot smaller, the engineers mentioned.
One disadvantage of the Lucid Air battery is the scale of one of many busbars – a strong metallic bar that carries present between modules. As a result of aluminum casting within the middle that separates the battery into two elements, Lucid had to make use of a bigger central busbar, which may drive up prices and use a variety of house. Smaller U-shaped bus bars are extra sensible, mentioned the engineers.
One other pitfall of this battery is that sure elements are harder to disassemble in comparison with Tesla or Rivian batteries, that are comparatively simpler to teardown, and therefore presumably simpler to service as effectively. General although, the engineers felt like Lucid’s philosophy was to make every little thing “as condensed and tightly packed as doable.”