We took a 1,000-horsepower electric luxury sedan for a spin on the streets of Silicon Valley

Lucid Air

We have driven, reported on, road-tripped, and talked about our fair share of electric and hybrid vehicles at Business Insider. These are exciting times for a technology that was born more than 100 years ago, but only started to gain steam in the last 20 years with the Toyota Prius.

Electric-vehicle sales reached a milestone in 2017, crossing the one-million-vehicle threshold for that year. Nearly 200,000 of those plug-in vehicles — up from about 159,000 in 2016.

That growth has spurred a whole new class of EVs from investor-funded startups. While many of these companies poach engineering and design talent from big-name automakers, the new companies themselves have never mass-produced a car before. It might be a stretch to call it an automotive renaissance, but it's starting to look that way.

Still, one thing remains the same — it is incredibly difficult to start a car company. Tesla CEO Elon Musk probably knows this better than anyone. Tesla is the first American automaker to go public since Ford Motor Company in 1956, but it took Tesla and its stakeholders nearly two decades and many hundreds of millions of dollars to get there.

Lucid Air

And as we have learned in the last couple years from the scandal-plagued electric-car startup, Faraday Future, the business of designing and building cars can easily lose traction if just enough things go sideways.

Nevertheless, a handful of electric-car startups in California are undeterred, and they are vying to bring the next mass-produced luxury electric vehicle to market.

Lucid Motors is one of those companies. Founded in 2007 under its former name, Atieva, the Newark, California-based company began developing its first electric vehicle in 2014.

The car, called Lucid Air, debuted in late 2016 as a 1,000-horsepower electric luxury sedan that Lucid said would rival Tesla's highly successful Model S.

Among other investors, Lucid is also backed by Venrock — the same venture capital firm that led Apple's Series A round in 1978.

A company spokesman told Business Insider Lucid has raised several hundred million dollars to date. The spokesman declined to give specific dollar figures. Lucid was preparing to close its Series D round fundraiser in January.

The Lucid Air will be the first vehicle out of the company's stable when it goes into production in 2019, the company said. Lucid invited Business Insider to check out a nearly finished representation of the car at its headquarters.

Scroll down to see how it went:

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