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Lucid unveils Air’s Dual-Motor, 1,080 HP powertrain and 9.9-second quarter mile

Credit: Lucid Motors

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Lucid Motors has released details on the powertrain it will use for its first electric vehicle, the Air. Lucid will equip the vehicle’s top configuration with a Dual-Motor, All-Wheel-Drive powertrain that is capable of 1,080 horsepower. Additionally, the Air was able to complete consecutive quarter-mile runs at under 10 seconds.

Lucid has developed the Air since 2016, and it has been fine-tuning the vehicle’s powertrain and all-electric, 113 kWh battery pack in preparation for entry into an increasingly competitive market. Over the past few weeks, the automaker has slowly released numerous details about the Air and its capabilities, starting with its 517-mile range and interior features. Now, Lucid is getting to the good stuff and is detailing its all-electric powertrain, which is the fastest to ever complete a quarter-mile.

The quarter-mile record was set by the Air’s Dream Edition variant at Sonoma Raceway in Northern California. Not only did the Air manage to set the record for the fastest quarter-mile time for an EV, but it beat the Tesla Model S and Porsche Taycan in the process.

Peter Rawlinson, CEO and CTO at Lucid, said that the company’s watchword has been “focus” since day one. But the focus goes much further than creating a fast performance vehicle.

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“Our watchword has been ‘focus’ since day one at Lucid – a focus on sound engineering principles, a focus on creating efficiencies, and a focus on maximizing power to create a world-class EV,” Rawlinson said.

Lucid’s focus has been to create a vehicle that highlights the optimization that the company’s engineering teams have worked on for the last three-and-a-half years. At the heart of the Air, a 900V+ electric drive unit that is small enough to fit in a regular suitcase packs over 650 horsepower. It is 45% lighter and 59% lighter than the closest competitor, the company said. At speeds capable of up to 20,000 RPM, the Lucid powertrain holds significant advantages over any car in the electric vehicle market.

“When the Lucid Air comes to market next spring, the world will see that we have developed the best electric vehicle technology possible by a wide margin and effectively created a new benchmark for EVs. The result is nothing short of a technological tour de force in every facet upon which a luxury performance car is measured,” Rawlinson said.

Creating efficiency with every part of an electric vehicle was crucial to Lucid’s mission to develop a world-class powertrain. The Air’s internal parts can achieve high-performance through a series of new inventions that are part of lucid’s intellectual property.

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“Most notably, an elegant and revolutionary new motor winding technology has been introduced to maximize power output and reduce electrical losses. The motor also features an innovative cooling system that more effectively removes heat from
the stator winding, minimizing losses and boosting efficiency,” the company said in a release.

The compact design, which Teslarati detailed in late-August, paves the way for the electric drive unit to take up as little room as possible while powering the Air to new heights.

“This is achieved in part by the transmission and differential, which have been fully integrated for the first time in an electric motor – together, they comprise a single rotational system that is both lightweight and extremely efficient. Meanwhile, Lucid
leverages a high voltage, silicon-carbide MOSFET system in its inverters to maximize efficiency, especially in real-world driving conditions,” Lucid said.

Lucid will debut the Air during an online reveal event on September 9, 2020. In addition to the Air’s finalized interior and exterior designs, Lucid will also release new details about pricing, production specifications, and available configurations during the event.

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Joey has been a journalist covering electric mobility at TESLARATI since August 2019. In his spare time, Joey is playing golf, watching MMA, or cheering on any of his favorite sports teams, including the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, Miami Heat, Washington Capitals, and Penn State Nittany Lions. You can get in touch with joey at joey@teslarati.com. He is also on X @KlenderJoey. If you're looking for great Tesla accessories, check out shop.teslarati.com

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SpaceX (SPCX) IPO is live today at $135: Here’s exactly what you need to know

SpaceX priced its historic IPO at $135 per share today, raising a record $75 billion.

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SpaceX officially priced its initial public offering at $135 per share, offering 555,555,555 shares of Class A common stock and raising $75 billion in what is the largest IPO in stock market history. Shares are set to begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on Friday, June 12, under the ticker symbol SPCX. The previous record holder was Saudi Aramco’s 2019 offering at $29 billion, followed by Alibaba’s $22 billion offering in 2014.

At $135 per share and roughly 555.6 million shares, the implied valuation sits near $1.75 trillion, which would make SpaceX roughly the seventh largest company in the United States, just above Tesla’s current market cap. Regular investors can request shares at the IPO price through Robinhood, Fidelity, Charles Schwab, SoFi, and E*TRADE, though the deal is heavily oversubscribed and most retail allocations will be partial or unfilled. Once trading opens June 12, anyone with a brokerage account can buy SPCX on the open market.

SpaceX’s amended S-1 is sparking a major Tesla merger conversation

 

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The valuation is anchored primarily by Starlink. Starlink crossed 10 million subscribers as of February 2026 and is adding 750,000 to 1.5 million new users per month, with the connectivity segment already posting a $1.19 billion profit last quarter. The offering also bundles in xAI following SpaceX’s all-stock merger earlier this year, adding Grok and the Colossus supercomputer to the investment thesis. As Teslarati reported, Starlink ended 2025 with $10 billion in revenue, a figure analysts project could reach $24 billion by end of 2026.

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives has been vocal in his support. “I think the time is right,” Ives said, adding that the offering expands the Elon Musk ecosystem rather than competing with Tesla. An average 12-month price target of $165 per share represents roughly 22% upside from the IPO price. Not everyone agrees – Motley Fool noted xAI is spending $1 billion per month playing catch-up to OpenAI and Anthropic.

Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with a single stated purpose. “Elon founded SpaceX with a goal to change humanity, to make us a multi-planet species,” CFO Bret Johnsen said in the company’s retail roadshow video this week. Musk himself has been more direct: “We are building the systems and technologies necessary to provide global connectivity on Earth and beyond, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”

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Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”

Tesla’s folding Supercharger just arrived in Europe and it changes how fast charging expands.

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Tesla’s Folding Unit Supercharger has officially landed in Europe, with the company teasing a new installation in its effort for a broader rollout targeting major motorway rest stops across the European continent in Q3 2026. The arrival marks a notable shift in how Tesla is thinking about network expansion, moving from hardware performance alone to engineering the logistics chain itself.

While Tesla did not reveal the exact location for the new folding Supercharger in Europe, the photo shared on X heavily suggests that this maybe somewhere in Norway. Historically, whenever Tesla rolls out an entirely new infrastructure architecture in Europe, whether it was the original Supercharger stalls years ago or these brand-new modular V4 “Folding Units”, Norway is almost always the designated launch pad because of its unmatched EV adoption rate and supportive infrastructure

The Folding Unit, introduced in March 2026, is a factory pre-assembled V4 charging station built on an industrial hinge system mounted to a heavy-duty concrete base. The entire assembly arrives on site ready to unfold and connect. Tesla confirmed the units feature telescopic light poles specifically designed for easy transportation and fast on-site deployment, a detail that signals how carefully the logistics chain has been engineered alongside the hardware itself. The design allows 33% more stalls per delivery truck, cuts installation time roughly in half, and reduces overall deployment costs by more than 20% compared to traditional installations.

Tesla’s newest “Folding V4 Superchargers” are key to its most aggressive expansion yet

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Tesla also noted telescopic light poles which provide benefits over traditional Supercharger installations that require fixed-height poles that are awkward to ship, slow to position on site, and often require separate crews and equipment to erect before charging hardware can even be staged. By engineering poles that compress for transit and extend on arrival, Tesla has removed one of the quieter bottlenecks in the physical deployment process. Every hour saved on a light pole installation is an hour redirected toward getting stalls energized. At scale, across dozens of new sites per quarter, those hours add up to a meaningful acceleration in how quickly a location goes from approved permit to serving its first customer.

Each Folding Unit pairs a single V4 power cabinet with eight charging posts. The V4 cabinet delivers up to 500 kW per stall for passenger vehicles and up to 1.2 MW for the Tesla Semi, supporting twice the stalls per cabinet at three times the power density of its predecessor. Longer cables make every new station immediately usable by non-Tesla vehicles, a priority as Tesla continues opening its network to Ford, GM, Rivian, Hyundai, Stellantis, and others.

As Teslarati reported when the Folding Unit was first unveiled, Tesla’s Gigafactory New York produced its final V3 Supercharger cabinet in March 2026 after more than seven years and 15,000 units, completing a full pivot to V4 production. The European arrival of the folding design is the next chapter in that transition.

Faster and cheaper deployment means Tesla can justify building in markets and corridors that were previously too expensive to serve, filling the coverage gaps that have slowed EV adoption outside major urban centers.

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Tesla stuns with another FSD approval in Europe, its second in two days

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Tesla has stunned by gaining yet another approval for its Full Self-Driving suite in Europe, its second in two days and its fifth overall.

Belgium will be the latest country to allow Tesla owners to utilize FSD on public roads in Europe, joining a quickly growing list that started with the Netherlands, Lithuania, and Estonia.

On Tuesday, Denmark announced its approval of the FSD suite, which has now been followed by Belgium just one day later.

The country’s Minister of Mobility, Annick De Ridder, announced the approval on her X account, stating that she had just signed the approval of Tesla FSD. It now goes to the country’s homologation department for the last step of the approval process.

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The Belgian approval is one of mighty importance because it truly shows how quickly countries in Europe could greenlight the FSD suite consecutively. Approvals are already coming in relatively quickly, which is a great sign.

Perhaps the next big development that could come from FSD approvals in Europe is an approval from a country like England, Italy, France, Spain, or Germany. It would be something to see how FSD would perform in a major European metro, such as London, Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Rome, or Berlin.

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Full Self-Driving does an excellent job of roaming around major U.S. cities like New York and Los Angeles, but other high-profile international cities of significance would truly mark a line in the sand for Tesla, which can simply enable any vehicle in its customer-owned fleet to run FSD with the correct approvals.

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