While Lucid Motors has been busy showcasing the best of its technology in flagship halo cars like the $250,000 Lucid Air Sapphire, the company is also focused on its “hero” car of sorts, the Lucid Air Pure. The Air Pure would come into the market as the young automaker’s most affordable car.
What makes the Lucid Air Pure special is not its tech or performance. Compared to its siblings in the Air line, the Pure is the most conservative. It does, however, have something valuable that its siblings today do not have — a sub-$90,000 starting price.
Lucid senior vice president of design and brand Derek Jenkins recently spoke with Automotive News to talk about the Lucid Air Pure. According to Jenkins, the Air Pure actually gives pride to the company’s design and engineering teams. This is because it’s the most affordable Air, but it’s not a bare-bones car at all.
“All of the development of the high-end cars has trickled down to this car at a better entry-level price, but still with pretty remarkable specifications,” Jenkins said, noting that this is the reason why the Pure is considered as the “hero of the group.”
The Lucid Air Pure presents a notable challenge for the EV maker, especially since the company has so far only been producing high-end cars that are priced at a premium. The company started with the limited Lucid Air Dream Edition last year, which started at a whopping $170,500, and it followed this up with the Lucid Air Grand Touring, which has a starting price of $155,650.
The Lucid Air Pure, as it’s been teased by the automaker, is painted in a new color called Fathom Blue, a steely shade that provides the premium sedan with a fresh aesthetic. Jenkins admitted that some Lucid employees actually prefer the Air Pure’s metal roof to the previous variants’ glass roof, even if it reduces the perception of space in the cabin.
“The feedback has been pretty remarkable,” the Lucid executive said.
Inside the Lucid Air Pure, the vehicle is equipped with an interior fabric that’s made from recycled materials. Lucid also fitted the vehicle with a leather alternative material that can help the company save on production costs. That being said, the Air Pure is still a base model, and some of its specs do reflect that.
While the Air Pure has an impressive range of 410 miles per charge from its 92-kWh battery pack, it falls short of the 516 miles offered by its more expensive sibling, the Lucid Air Grand Touring. This might not be much of a deal breaker for some customers, however, as the Air Pure also ends up having greater rear seat legroom due to the absence of several battery modules.
The Lucid Air Pure’s launch edition will not necessarily carry a sub-$90,000 price tag, as it would be equipped with optional features such as all-wheel-drive, upgraded wheels, and a better sound system, which push the price of the Air Pure to about $100,550. The *actual* base version of the Air Pure, which will feature a single motor at the rear, would start at $89,050, and it is expected to go into production next year.
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Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s next Uranium in Uranus merch is Boring Company’s weirdest tease yet
Elon Musk teased a glowing new Boring Company merch idea, complete with a Geiger counter.
Elon Musk teased the next piece of Boring Company merchandise on X Saturday, and it is exactly as unserious as fans of the company’s product history have come to expect. “The next @boringcompany merch will put Uranium in Uranus,” Musk wrote in a thread posted early Saturday morning. He followed up by explaining that the item would glow in the dark, “because otherwise how could you find it,” and that a Geiger counter would be sold separately as “an optional strap-on.”
Musk closed the thread with a line that doubles as a mission statement for the tunneling company’s merchandise arm: “It’s not easy coming up with something that is both outrageously unsellable and yet extremely popular.”
The Boring Company has built a small but consistent side business out of novelty items that start as jokes and end up selling out. The company’s Not-a-Flamethrower raised roughly $10 million in a few days back in 2018, moving all 20,000 units it produced. Its Burnt Hair perfume, priced around $100 a bottle, sold out fast enough that scalpers were flipping units on eBay for ten times the retail price. Boring Bricks, made from tunneling spoil, followed the same playbook of teasing a product on X months before it became real.
Musk has not said what the actual item will be, only that it involves uranium and glows in the dark. Given the pattern, that vagueness is probably intentional. Past merch announcements have started as one-line jokes and taken weeks or months to turn into an actual product listing on the company’s site, and there is no guarantee this one follows through at all.
The timing lines up with a period of real momentum for the Boring Company outside of the joke merchandise. The company said last week it plans to double the number of operational stations on its Vegas Loop by the end of the year, a target tied to a hiring push for drivers and operations managers. Prufrock-5, one of the company’s tunnel boring machines, also just wrapped a test tunnel in Bastrop, Texas, and is expected to relaunch on its next assignment in November.
Whether the uranium joke turns into an actual product remains to be seen. Musk’s post did not include a price, a shipping date, or even a name for the item, which has historically meant a Boring Company website page goes up quietly, password protected, sometime before an announcement.
News
NASA taps SpaceX for more astronaut missions as Boeing Starliner remains grounded
NASA just gave SpaceX a $946 million contract for three more astronaut missions through 2030.
NASA has awarded SpaceX a $946 million contract modification covering three more astronaut missions to the International Space Station, according to an announcement the agency published Friday. The award adds Crew-15, Crew-16, and Crew-17 to SpaceX’s existing Commercial Crew Transportation Capability contract, bringing the agreement’s total value to $5.92 billion across 17 flights.
SpaceX confirmed the award on X, writing that it was excited for Falcon 9 and Dragon to launch NASA’s Crew-15, 16, and 17 missions to the Space Station from Florida. The new missions cover ground, launch, in orbit, and return operations, along with cargo transport and a lifeboat capability while docked at the station, and the period of performance runs through 2030.
We’re excited for Falcon 9 and Dragon to launch @NASA’s Crew-15, 16, and 17 missions to the @Space_Station from Florida https://t.co/Qm16vVK9F3 pic.twitter.com/drg3s7GtuM
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 18, 2026
The award follows a notice of intent NASA issued in May, when the agency first signaled it would purchase up to six additional post certification missions from SpaceX. Teslarati covered that filing at the time, noting NASA cited technical issues and schedule delays encountered by Boeing as a driving factor. Friday’s contract modification locks in three of those six missions, with the remaining three left open for NASA to award later, potentially to Boeing if Starliner clears certification.
Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner has still not flown an operational crew rotation mission for NASA. The spacecraft’s most recent crewed test flight in 2024 ended without the astronauts returning aboard Starliner, and the company has spent the time since working through thruster problems. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said this week that SpaceX is not retiring Crew Dragon today, for sure, while stopping short of committing to fly it past 2030.
Crew-12 is currently docked at the space station, and NASA has said Crew-13 is targeting a launch in the coming weeks. The newly awarded Crew-15 through Crew-17 missions extend SpaceX’s role as NASA’s primary way of getting astronauts to and from orbit well into the back half of the decade, regardless of what happens with Starliner or Starship in the meantime.
Investor's Corner
New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point
New drone footage shows Tesla’s dedicated Optimus factory steel frame nearing completion at Giga Texas.
Tesla’s dedicated Optimus factory at Gigafactory Texas is closing in on a finished steel frame, according to drone footage posted Thursday afternoon by longtime site observer Joe Tegtmeyer. In the video, Tegtmeyer said structural steel assembly is now about five column grids away from reaching the building’s north perimeter beam, putting the primary skeleton in its final stretch roughly six months after Tesla broke ground on the North Campus site in late March.
The Giga Texas Optimus Factory latest update … construction keeps moving fast!
Steel assembly is now only about 5 column grids from the north perimeter beam. Concrete is going in on the three upper floors, rebar is still being laid for more pours, and footing / grade-beam work… pic.twitter.com/qvFPvwnYzW
— Joe Tegtmeyer 🚀 🤠🛸😎 (@JoeTegtmeyer) September 17, 2026
Tegtmeyer’s footage shows concrete already going in on three upper floors while crews continue laying rebar and pouring grade beam footings at ground level. That kind of parallel work, steel rising at one end of the site while concrete sets at the other, is a scheduling approach Tesla used at the original Giga Texas building and appears to be repeating here to save time before the plant’s targeted 2027 production start.
Teslarati has tracked the building’s progress since Tesla confirmed construction was officially underway in May, when the first steel structure went up on what was then bare, reclaimed land. The facility is part of a more than 5.2 million square foot expansion of Giga Texas’s North Campus that Tesla has said will eventually run nearly the length of the existing vehicle factory, over 4,000 feet, while sitting somewhat narrower. Musk has pegged the long term output target at 10 million Optimus units a year once the line is running at full capacity, a volume that would dwarf the one million unit pilot line Tesla is standing up separately at its Fremont, California factory.
Tesla Giga Texas to feature massive Optimus V4 production line
The Texas facility sits alongside another major buildout on the same campus. Terafab, the joint Tesla and SpaceX chip fabrication plant that will eventually supply the silicon running Optimus units in the field. Housing robot assembly and chip production on the same grounds is a deliberate supply chain decision, cutting down on the shipping and lead time that would otherwise sit between the two.
Tesla has not given an updated timeline beyond its previously stated goal of bringing high volume Optimus production online at the site in the summer of 2027. Fremont’s smaller pilot line began mass producing the current Gen 3 robot in January, with that plant expected to build tens of thousands of units this year primarily to generate the real world data Tesla needs to refine the robot’s software before Giga Texas ramps up. Six months of visible construction progress, tracked almost entirely through Tegtmeyer’s recurring drone flights, gives the clearest outside look yet at how seriously Tesla is treating that 2027 deadline.
Elon Musk’s next Uranium in Uranus merch is Boring Company’s weirdest tease yet
NASA taps SpaceX for more astronaut missions as Boeing Starliner remains grounded
