While the world's most famous automakers were pulling the covers off their latest, shiniest offerings at the Los Angeles Auto Show, a dark gray sedan circled the convention center, almost silently. Riding on 21-inch wheels, the Lucid Air cuts a muscular stance, its door handles flush with the body of the car, one thin bar of light bars stretching across its front, another along the slightly boxy rear. Fully electric, it offers a tempting vision of the future.

"This is our very precious multimillion-dollar prototype—we are super careful with this machine," says Lucid's Chief Technology Officer, Peter Rawlinson. But a prototype, no matter how lovely, does not make a automaker. The Air is the first vehicle from Lucid, a Silicon Valley outfit presenting itself as a new Tesla. Because, as Elon Musk will tell you, there's quite a gulf between designing a great car and producing and selling that car. Tesla may have booked hundreds of thousands of preorders, but it's struggling to meet demand—let alone make a profit.

That's why you likely haven't heard of the other electric car startups that thought they could replicate Tesla's success, like Faraday Future, Fisker, Aptera, and Coda—each is struggling or has folded or fizzled out under the immense financial pressure.

Lucid, which has now built a grand total of five cars, believes it can not only do better than the other startups but also be competitive against the major automakers.

Lucid Air

Usually when I'm offered a ride in an engineering preproduction car, I want to be up front, because that's where the action happens. But the Air—despite a claimed, grin inducing, 0 to 60 mph time of 2.5 seconds—is best experienced from the back. So I sink into one of the two seats, which recline so far back I'm gazing at the LA skyline through the glass roof, feeling like an Apollo astronaut about to be launched into space.