EP38: Best of the Bay Part 5 – ‘25 Toyota Camry, Range Rover, “decontented” Lucid Air – “That thing is SICK!”

Jon Summers is the Motoring Historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider. On his show he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, motoring travel.

• The Donnas – Take It Off
• “Camry Gonna Camry” – a bit better than you expect, in every respect: price, performance, look and feel inside and outside
• Full Fat Range Rover; the double whammy of the look and smell of the leather so memorable. Only 1 on road driving mode. The most civilized car we drove on the test day, makes you feel like an aristocrat. J can’t do a Rangey though, he already has a corgi!
• Chops Garage (link)
• Lazerhawk – Dream Machine
• Episode 1 and driving the 1100hp Lucid to its frightening top speed two years ago
• Lucid decontented: 430hp, no moonroof, 80k not 200k
• The pre-production one in Santana Row vs. the up contented 1100hp with the Restoration Harware Interior
• The decontented car is the best car we drove during BotB
• The awesome calibration of the regen braking – it feels like a big german sedan engine braking at autobahn speeds
• Smooth, Swift and Sprint modes; about power delivery style. J preferred Smooth.
• Makes the Genesis, Rangey feel a last generation
• The Opinion of a Prius Car Camper – “That Thing Is SICK!”
• Overall, the Camry was Best Value; Lucid was Best Car; J would take the Genesis G80 sedan; the Single Best Thing was the Hellcat motor 
• Zodiac Mindwarp – Airline Highway

[00:00:00] John Summers is the motoring historian. He was a company car thrashing, technology sales rep, that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider. Hailing from California, he collects cars and bikes built with plenty of cheap and fast, and not much reliable. On his show, he gets together with various co hosts to talk about new and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.

Good day, good morning, good afternoon. It is John Summers, the motoring historian, and this is part five of my Best of the Bay road test series. This is the shortest episode, but this has the two cars that I thought were all together the best, and the best of really a pretty good bunch. So, I felt all round the best was the Camry, which I talk about first, and that was just because of the amount of performance it had next to the amount of money it cost.

[00:01:00] Money no object, the Lucid was the best. I liked the Genesis G80 better, but the Lucid was the best car. But I guess the, the other car in this group is the Rangey, the full Fat Range Rover and kind of what an awesome piece of kit that was. If the Lucid is next generation, the Range Rover was the very best of what we have been doing up to now, or you know, or at least the leather.

Alright, so then there was an overnight and then the following morning there were the last three cars. First, the 2025 Toyota Camry, XSE. So could anything be more boring? The first thing I wrote was Camry gonna Camry, and that was after I’d sat in traffic in it, because the traffic was clearer and I’d done the [00:02:00] forest route up the hill, winding around a little bit.

It was nice. It was premium. It felt, if you just shut your eyes, you’d have thought it was a Lexus. And that is, has been the way Camrys have been for, for as long as I can remember, they’ve always felt a little bit better than they should have done. out on the fast sweepers. Was it as good as the Elantra N?

No. Was it nearly as good? Oh yeah. Was it a lot better than you ever would have expected a Camry to be at speeds far, far higher than you would ever have expected it to be able to cope with? Yes. It was really a Good car to drive and completely inoffensive. You know, all of the modes were easy to use. It was modern, but it wasn’t too much.

It was techie, but it’s just all of the things that Camry does so well. This just did all of those things so well. And then when you look at the price and it’s 37 grand, you’re like bloody hell. This is without question, the [00:03:00] best. Combination of value here. When you actually step out of the car and look at it and think, if it was my money, would I want to write the check?

You know, the car looks good. It has a visual, it makes a visual statement. I like this sort of waterfall grill, holy waterfall grill that the thing has. I mean, it’s, I still struggle with that much visual aggression against the like front wheel drive four cylinder car. But, you know, if you look at it for what it is, if you compare it with, with Accord, you know, it competes head on and in a convincing way.

And, and yeah, normally I’d be all about the Accord, but having driven this Camry, I would urge anybody who’s in that market to look closely at what they have on offer. I mean the guy’s doing like awesome gas mileage like it was in the 40s when I toggled for it’s a hybrid so it’s quiet ish around town but there’s no range anxiety fear it’s just most of the people most of the time this was just [00:04:00] the regular boy’s choice and and If you really are looking for car buying advice and you just want something practical and you’re only shopping from this, you know, of the stuff we drove, this was the best car.

It filled the definition of car best for most people, most of the time. So then from the really, I mean, I’m not sure from the sublime then, because that is a sublime piece of design. We went to the, I’m not sure if you’d describe it as ridiculous, but I mean, the Range Rover, I opened the door and smelled the leather and my word.

You just sign on the dotted line if you’re in the dealership. Just the way the leather looks, the way the leather smells. Between the moment you open the door and there’s the smell, and then you park your arse on the seat and you feel what the leather feels like. My word, we British can do interiors very, very well.

I know the reliability on Land Rovers and Range Rovers is, is dodgy, but when you’re spending six figures brand new, you know, you hope not to worry about those kinds of things to your humour. Um, that’s the way I’d feel about it. If you’re the [00:05:00] first, you know, reliability, something for the second customer to, for the second owner to worry about.

No sport mode, just a comfort mode, half a dozen different off road modes, snow, wading, all of this kind of stuff. Obviously I didn’t try any of that. I just. Like the fact that it had a distinctive feel to the screen and that kind of interaction, like distinctive Range Rover y kind of feel, but easy to use, you know, easy to use, easy to understand, big buttons, big touchscreen buttons, you know, you weren’t like diving into irritating menus, it was.

I played with the infotainment unprovoked of the traffic light, and then instead of being like, that was irritating and not playing with it again, which is what happened with most of the cars, I played with it again afterwards and, and, you know, saw if I could lower the suspension anymore or any of that kind of thing, but this is not the Range Rover’s party piece, right?

The Range Rover’s party piece is when you just get up in the saddle and stab the throttle, you feel like you’re, uh, [00:06:00] member of the aristocracy. I mean, you just do, you like float along the highway. You know, was it that fast? No. Was it adequately fast? Yes. To all intents and purposes, it’ll get down the road plenty fast enough for most people and it’ll change direction fine.

But most importantly, it’ll ride so well. And the thing that I wrote and, and that really is, is the takeaway is that. Without question, this was the most civilized car that we tested. It just felt so well thought out and luxurious. With the Durango, you were trying to justify spending all the money. With this, the difference between.

The leather used in the Range Rover and the leather used in the Genesis, that alone justified the 30 or 40 grand price differential. Yes, you could have had a Camry in between that, but you didn’t want a Camry in between because you wanted Range Rover leather, Range Rover design, the Range Rover aesthetic.

You know, it’s [00:07:00] not my thing. I couldn’t do a Range Rover and a bloody Corgi, right? I’ve already got the Corgi. That’s ridiculous enough. I can’t do a Range Rover as well. But this one, it set me thinking a little bit. I mean, that YouTuber I follow, Chop’s Garage, he has a Range Rover. And as I look at his, covered in mud, parked up outside his, uh, his dealership, I’m like, you know, There is something cool about an old Rangey, so I don’t know, maybe, uh, let me do my old Jaguars first and then I might get around to my old Rangeys.

Yeah, for the Rangey I wrote, the leather double exclamation mark, smell, touch. Then I wrote, no sport, comfort only on road mode. Then I wrote civilized. I think I just said all those things, so you can probably trim those out, but maybe if you weren’t listening, you know.[00:08:00]

And this leads us on to the last and, and objectively speaking, the best car that we drove. So it’s double the price of the Camry, which is why it’s hard to recommend it. But. You know, in terms of, was it the best piece of technology? Yes, it was. And that’s the Lucid. So it was what? Probably two years ago now that I drove that 1100 horsepower air edition one.

It’s the first of these pods. They told me to slow down on highway one. They said, did I want it in sport mode? I said, all right then. So they put it in sport mode and then on the piece of road where it opened out where I’ve done obscene speeds on sports bikes, I just did obscene speeds in the Lucid and it was just a point and squirt, right?

It was not, uh, you know, and you just squirt and when they expected me to lift off, I carried on squirting and it squirted all the way up to a bonkers speed, frankly, to the extent that even I was a bit scared and then they asked me to slow down. So that’s what happened on the last one. We were kind of running out of road as well.

I was, I was worried, [00:09:00] actually, I was a little worried that that might have, have affected whether or not they would let me drive this new one. Anyway, right, Lucid, as we know, are in a bit of trouble financially. Apparently, I spoke to the rep. Because of this whole, like, funded by the Saudi government thing, they’re not going anywhere.

This car that they brought was about half the price of the one that I’d driven. Visually, it looked pretty similar. The rep described it as decontented. It didn’t have a moonroof. It had 430 So you’re driving it thinking, is this too decontented because prior to driving that 1100 horsepower one, they had one in a mall somewhere in Silicon Valley and, uh, I was at a loose end with my father in law was in town.

It was me, my father in law and my son, when my son was, you know, younger and I’d signed up to get mailings from Lucid and they were like, do you want to come to our showroom in, you know. Festival mall or whatever it was called. It’s some cheesy [00:10:00] mall in San Jose. I hate the place. But anyway, we went there.

The guy was really keen to do his spiel before we got in the car. And afterwards I realized why. Because, uh, the materials, they looked great from 10 feet away. But when you went close and touched them, my god, the quality was terrible. Well, when I said that to the people who, when they introduced the Dream Edition that was the 1100 horsepower one, they were shocked by that because they really wanted the car to have this Awesome California luxury kind of feel and that 1100 horsepower one really did.

So then I was like, Oh, wow, these guys are lucid. They’re really good at baiting and switching, you know, impressing us with an 1100 horsepower moon roof, you know, feels like restoration hardware, luxury furniture store inside, right? They’re great at doing that and then, you know, now in order to get from 200 grand to 80 grand, you know, not only if they shed horsepower, right, what’s it going to feel like inside?

Is it going to have cheapened out too much? That was my fear. [00:11:00] And the answer is absolutely not. You know, had it been my 70 or 80 grand, I’d have bought the G80, but I like steak and potatoes. Most people, most of the time, it is Mercedes S class quality, right? The smoothness. Every element of the way the vehicle’s designed is thought about well, so I drove, I drove out and leaned on it a bit.

So when I drove back, I very much had a feeling that, you know, I’d done this test driving, I leaned out of the high window in terms of my driving license for the last Two days, and I didn’t want to lean out any further, so I just put the cruise on and sat, and I found I had my wheel, my hand, on the flat bit of the steering wheel at the bottom, and my thought was, wow, this flat bit is a really good piece of design, and that’s just.

Uh, a little vignette that shows you the way that the Lucid is, uh, is, is designed. Their shift mechanism is a little bit like [00:12:00] Mercedes have been. So it’s like a, a little toggle lever, toggle switch. And you just like, you push the button and then knock it up or knock it down to make it go into gear. No moonroof.

And obviously, you know, quite hard plastics on the inside. You could see it was, you know, a 318, not a 325 kind of feeling if we’re going to use E30 BMW kind of comparisons, but you know, it did not feel, it still felt really, all the things that were cool about the 1100 horsepower one that I drove, they were still cool about this one.

And you know, would I have wanted a moonroof? Yeah. You know, you can order the base one and have the moon roof. And similarly, this mega technology with the motors. Yeah. I wanted to talk about the regen braking. So around town, it’s quite aggressive regen braking, but if you’re like really leaning on it and doing high speed, if you come out of the gas, that regen braking is nowhere near so aggressive.

It’s there, but it’s nowhere near so aggressive. It just acts like [00:13:00] engine braking. Like, if you came out of the gas in, like, if you were hard in the gas in top gear in a big German sedan, if you came out of the gas, imagine the kind of engine braking that you would get. Controlled deceleration. That’s how this, this Lucid is.

So it means that the car doesn’t need to be pointing straight for you to be able to use that deceleration and use it in a controlled way. The Fiat, you’d be worried you were going to spin off into the scenery if the car was in any way not pointing straight and you were. going to trigger the regen braking at north of 60 miles an hour.

Three modes, smooth, swift and sprint. It seemed to be about how the power was delivered. I actually liked smooth best. Sprint seemed just to be about, you know, putting a crick in your neck. The interior, whilst it was nice and whilst it was similar to, you know, the previous one, price is similar to the G80 sedan.

So with the cars I drove, that was the obvious comparison point. [00:14:00] In comparison to that, the G80 just bloody destroys it because the quality of materials is just so much nicer. And even if you do prefer, you know. Roughly recycled plastic over leather. I just feel like the way that it was put together, the Genesis was just a nicer place to be.

But, you know, I, I dunno, like I’m an old dude, you know, I’m sitting recording this in my man cave library garage space. And, you know, I’m sitting on a leather Chesterfield to do it. So, you know, I like. the leather and the wood and cars as they have been. So if I’m thinking about what’s best here, you know, even maybe on the interior, I could see some people who like a clean California, modern look and feel, that person is going to choose not the Genesis.

They’re going to. Choose the lucid. Yeah. So this is what I put it that the lucid it makes the G80 and the Range Rover. It makes them feel very old. It makes them feel a [00:15:00] previous generation technology. So on those last days, I did the same route each day and I drove and turned around in the same. lay by.

And now I stepped out to take pictures. I might even include some of the pictures in, in the thing of that first of the Rangy and then of the, uh, of the Lucid. And when I was photographing the Rangy, I noticed at the side of the lay by, there was a guy who was obviously traveling and camping in his Prius.

So he’s got like a Prius with a tent off the side of it. He’s got a couple of big German shepherds and they were like lying around the place. And I noticed that because they’d noticed me because, you know, I’d like turned around and approached in it at the car, the car. So, uh, as I’m photographing the Lucid, the dude yells out, I’ve just got to say something that thing is sick and we talked a bit more about the car and he was like, you know, I’m sorry, I interrupted you and all of that.

And I was like, no, dude, I’m so glad you did because. This is a good way to end this review, right? The, of all the cars I drove, the only one that [00:16:00] provoked comment from a passerby was that one, because that’s how futuristic this quote, decontented, close quotes, lucid is. So I wonder, maybe this decontent, this, this did not, you know, I don’t need.

In my Caesar salad, I don’t need the chicken. I don’t need the cheese. I still enjoy Caesar salad without those things. And, and maybe that’s what we’re talking about with this, uh, Lucid. I don’t know what the edition was because that’s how they, they name it. But yeah, if you’re in the market and you’ve got the money to spend, um, that definitely is of the stuff that we drove the most tom tomorrow.

Kind of vehicle. It was, uh, truly next generational. I wrote that and, you know, I’ll stand by it. Truly a next generational vehicle. Well, thanks for listening.[00:17:00]

This episode has been brought to you by Grand Touring Motorsports as part of our motoring podcast network. For more episodes like this, tune in each week for more exciting and educational content from organizations like The Exotic Car Marketplace, The Motoring Historian, BrakeFix, and many others. If you’d like to support Grand Touring Motorsports and the Motoring Podcast Network, sign up for one of our many [00:18:00] sponsorship tiers at www.

patreon. com forward slash gtmotorsports. Please note that the content, opinions, and materials presented and expressed in this episode are those of its creator. And this episode has been published with their consent. If you have any inquiries about this program, please contact the creators of this episode via email or social media, as mentioned in the episode.

Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

• 00:00 Best of the Bay Road Test Series Overview
• 01:43 Toyota Camry XSE Review
• 04:22 Range Rover Review
• 08:14 Lucid Review
• 16:49 Conclusion and Sponsor Message