Porsche And Hyundai Just Beat Lucid Where It Matters Most

• Porsche Taycan tops Germany’s EV fast-charging test, beating the Lucid Air.
• The Hyundai Ioniq 6 also performs better and comes closest to matching the Taycan.
• A combination of consistent charging curves and long range determines which EVs are truly suitable for road trips.

The best EVs for road trips combine excellent real-world range figures with quick charging speeds. You would think that combination would make the Lucid Air Grand Touring the best possible vehicle for long-distance driving. But that’s not the case, since it doesn’t even make the top three in a new long-range EV test conducted by the largest German automotive club.

Germany’s ADACdoes a road trip test that measures the long-distance driving capability of all new EVs, but it doesn’t run them dead in testing. Instead, it simulates a mixed driving route on a dyno (known as the ADAC EcoTest cycle), drains the battery until it has 10% left, then charges the car for 20 minutes and notes how much range it has gained. It then adds up how much it drove before charging and the range gained through charging.

ADAC has been running this test for a while. The Lucid Air Grand Touring used to be in third place, but with more vehicles making the top ten this year, it has now dropped into fifth. It still has the biggest battery out of all EVs tested (112 kilowatt-hours) and the second-highest range before needing to charge at 10%, but it loses out when the time comes to charge. That shows just how quickly the EV field is improving.

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The Lucid is rated to charge at up to 300 kilowatts, giving it a 10% to 80% charging time of around 20 minutes. However, in ADAC’s testing, which uses the same 300 kW Alpitronic station for all the cars, it never even came close to achieving that. It peaked at 243 kW and exhibited a rather poor charging curve, where power had already dropped to 145 kW by the time it hit 50% and by 70% it had dipped below 100 kW.

That’s why it only gained 192 miles (309 km) in the 20-minute charging session, which added up with its measured range of 341 miles (550 km), only got it up to 533 miles (859 km). That’s still a very good result, and an Air is still one of the best long-range EVs out there, but there are four other EVs that will take you farther in the same time frame.

The top performer was the Porsche Taycan Performance Plus with a 97 kWh battery and a combined rating of 609 miles (981 km). It only managed 318 miles (518 km) before reaching 10% and plugging in. However, its charging curve was far better than the Lucid’s. It immediately started charging at 290 kW, then it went up to 295 kW and didn’t drop below 250 kW until it hit 63%. At 75% it was still pulling 200 kW. Its average charging power was a very impressive 274.9 kW, while the Lucid only managed 153.4 kW on average.

It’s remarkable that the vehicle in second place only has a 77.4 kWh battery, but it somehow scored better than vehicles with close to or over 100 kWh of capacity. The runner-up is the Hyundai Ioniq 6 single-motor, which managed to cover 311 miles (502 km) before being charged and then regained 266 miles (429 km) in 20 minutes for a total of 578 miles (931 km). Its charging curve is nowhere near as impressive as the Porsche’s, since it starts at 120 kW and it only reaches its peak of 235 kW at 52%, but its average is still better than the Lucid’s at 189.7 kW. Considering how cheap the Hyundai is relative to the Porsche and Lucid, it's amazing.

The Audi A6 E-Tron is now third in the rankings, covering 325 miles (524 km) before recharging at 10% and gaining 246 miles (397 km) during the charging session for a total of 572 miles (921 km). It runs at 800 volts and has a claimed peak charging rate of 270 kW, which it actually exceeded, peaking at 281 kW and staying above its claimed maximum from 10% through 27% before dropping to 200 kW and below.

Although this is a laboratory test, its findings show exactly what it takes for an EV to be good for long-distance driving. Usual headline figures such as battery capacity, claimed range or peak charging power don’t tell the whole story—it’s consistency that matters. So while everybody points to the claimed range as the defining number for a long-range EV, this test shows that it’s a bit more complicated than that, as more factors come into play.

The fact that the Taycan was able to maintain over close to 300 kW throughout most of its charging session is truly remarkable, and it shows that making batteries bigger and bigger isn’t the only way to go. We knew it was a road trip hero, but it’s surprising to see it’s followed by the affordable Ioniq 6, which trumped all the other EVs through its consistent charging performance and efficiency that allows it to extract more miles out of a battery pack that’s considerably smaller than that of other rivals at the top of this list.

ADAC says it uses a 300 kW charger as the benchmark because that is now the most common power rating for DC fast chargers in Germany. But it will likely update its testing procedure and include a more powerful charger since there are already plenty of 400 kW chargers online in the country and there are several new EVs that can utilize all of it, like the BMW iX3 or the Zeekr 7X, vehicles which could top this ADAC chart next year when they go through the same test.