Lucid and Tesla aren’t exactly the friendliest of car brands. Lucid’s founder and former CEO Peter Rawlinson was the engineer behind the brilliance of the Tesla Model S. After he formed his own company, the two brands have become direct rivals. So it’s funny to watch a Lucid Gravity charge up a Tesla Model 3, using the NACS charging port that Tesla made popular. However, Lucid’s vehicle-to-vehicle charging system doesn’t discriminate against the cars plugged into it. It charges blindly, as it should.
The Lucid Gravity’s vehicle-to-vehicle charging system is called RangeXchange and uses its native NACS port to charge other NACS-equipped vehicles. There’s a special cable and adapter in the Gravity’s trunk designed for it, and it’s pretty simple to use. You plug one end of the cable into the Lucid’s charge port and the lights will turn blue and blink. Inside, the screen will say “RangeXchange Ready.” The screen will then ask you to set your desired battery reserve, so that it won’t drop its own state of charge under whatever you set it to.
Photo by: Patrick George
After you plug the other end into the other car, in this case the Model 3, the Lucid won’t start transferring juice until you click “Start Sharing” on its screen. Once you do that, the Lucid will start charging up the other car at up to 40 amps and 240 volts. Well, Out of Spec’s Kyle Conner only saw 237 volts, so not the full beans but barely any voltage sag.
How convenient is it to use one EV to charge up another? Not very. A Model 3 can only add about 30 miles of range per hour of charging at 240 volts, and few cars can do much better, so it isn’t going to be the most practical choice of charging for most circumstances. But in a pinch, this could help someone out of a jam. Maybe an hour or two’s worth of charging can get someone enough range to get home or to find a DC fast charger. So don’t think of Lucid’s RangeXchange as a mobile charge station but more of a rolling EV jerrycan. Sharing is caring.
