Lucid Is Buying My Car Back – More Problems!

After just 11 months, Lucid is buying back my car entirely. When I originally got this Air Touring, my plan was to lease it for 3 years and then decide whether to buy it out or give it back. Well, I didn't even make it a full year until signing a document that basically says, "This offer is intended to provide you, at a minimum, with what you may be entitled to under lemon law. " Woo. Effectively, Lucid says they want your experience to be excellent. They realize it wasn't, and they want to make it right. Now, just to catch everyone up, I made a video explaining all of the problems I've had with the car, and then I made another video explaining Lucid's response on how they plan to address many of these concerns. And after the first video, many of you were like, "Why in the world are you keeping the car? " But based on Lucid's response, which I found very respectable, I thought, "Okay, I'll see this thing through, and hopefully some updates will improve my car as time goes on. " Now, I don't think enough time has really passed for them to fix everything, but I've basically reached my breaking point with the car after a pretty rough weekend trip with it. So, we'll get into why they're buying it back and that whole process, but I have to start with what went wrong with the car on a simple 400-mile weekend trip. All of the failures I'm about to describe happened over 4 days, leaving on a Thursday and coming home on a Sunday. All right, first issue when just packing up, doors wouldn't open. So, the car was unlocked, all the door handles are popped out, and I could open the front door, but the rear door wouldn't open. This is why people hate these style door handles. We had something that worked, now we have electronic buttons, and even when the car is unlocked, sometimes they don't work. That is just so painfully frustrating. Okay, next problem, I finally get the rear doors opened, I get my dog in the back, we're driving along, and I notice my dog seems to be getting hot. All right, I'm like, "What the heck? " I check the heated seats because I've had problems with those in the past with my dog. Nope, it's not that. It's literally the air. So, what happened? Well, despite both rear climate zones being set to 65° F, one side feels warm, while one side feels cool. Now, I was actually able to replicate this error once I got home as I've got a data logging thermometer. So, I dropped a thermocouple in each of the rear AC vents, and sure enough, even though both are set to the exact same temperature, one is blowing 10° C hotter than the other. And this was tested inside of my garage, so it's not like the sun is shining on one side of the car, and so the car is adjusting for the different temperatures within the car. Both sides have all the same inputs, yet one gets warm air, while the other gets cool air. All right, next error over that weekend, the white lines on the reverse camera just never loaded. Usually, there are white lines that move as you move the steering wheel, showing where you're reversing into. They just went away. Not a huge deal, most days I know how to park, but it's just another example of the software glitching out. All right, next Apple CarPlay failed. So, I had the navigation pulled up in CarPlay, I hit start, and it simply does nothing. So, CarPlay had loaded, but you couldn't use navigation. And it maintained this failure even after leaving the car, coming back, and trying again. And then later, CarPlay just wouldn't even load entirely. So, you get in the car, it says it's starting Apple CarPlay, but it never does. It just spins and nothing happens. All right, now here's the big one, and this one actually freaked me out a little bit, and it was a wild glitch to see. Now, I must preface this by saying I've got about 7,000 mi on the car when this happened. And for those 7,000 mi, ever since I bought the thing, in both my profile and my wife's profile, we both have had the stop mode set to hold rather than roll. This is basically one pedal driving because it means if you let off the accelerator, the car will slow down. And because its stop mode is set to hold, it will bring you to a complete stop. And it will hold the car there until you touch the accelerator pedal. So, for the entire time that I've had the car up until now, if my feet are not on either pedal, the car is not moving. You basically never need to touch the brake pedal except for emergency stops. That is critical information for this story. All right, so I'm going to go rent some skis. I drive up to the ski shop. I park in the parking lot by simply letting off the accelerator pedal. I don't touch the brake pedal at all and the car comes to a stop in the parking spot and I get out. So, I rent the skis. I load up the car. I get in to drive it away and here's where things get wonky. To start the car, you of course get in. You put your foot on the brake pedal and then you put it in reverse. So, I do this. The car's in reverse and as soon as I let my foot off that brake pedal, the car starts rolling forward. So, I immediately hit the brake pedal and

think, "Okay, it must not have engaged reverse because I went the wrong way. " Now, I was on a slight decline, but any other time I've done this, if the car's in reverse and I let off the brake pedal, the car does not move. So, I do it again. Cycle from park to reverse. Let off the brake pedal and once again, the car starts rolling forward. Now, I'm freaking out because I'm like, "Is the car broken? " So, I give it one last try. Go to park. Put it in reverse. And this time, I quickly go from the brake pedal to the accelerator and whew, the car actually goes backwards. Okay, red, reverse works, but what the heck happened? Well, while I was in that ski shop without anyone being inside the vehicle, it just switched the stop mode setting from hold to roll all on its own. That is crazy. I mean, think of a scenario where you're parallel parked on a steep hill and then this happens. Like say San Francisco. There is no doubt I would have ran into the car in front of me. It is not too difficult to imagine a scenario where this simple setting change results in something even worse happening, especially if you're completely used to a different setting. So, this to me was a wild glitch to see. Now, it has done similar things in the past, but not with settings which I felt like were critical. For example, numerous times it switched from percentage to miles for the battery state of charge without me switching it. But, this isn't some critical function, so I never really thought much of it. So, that one had me genuinely concerned, but the fun's not over yet. Next up, once again, I was getting different temperatures on the rear AC vents. Okay, turns out that is just a consistent problem on my car. Next, I was driving in a 45 mph zone and it told me the speed limit was 75 mph. And for what it's worth, it wasn't 75 before or after that 45 mph zone. So, I really don't know where it makes these numbers up from. Consistently, the car will give incorrect speed limits. And then finally, and this is a reoccurring problem, the music just stopped playing while in a city with full service. And it does this all the time. All the time it will just randomly pause your music. I've had it paused three times during the same song, and it never resumes playing no matter how long you wait. You have to hit play again. So, you're hitting play all the time, which just starts to become really annoying. All right, so summarizing, I experienced at least eight unique errors on a single weekend trip. So, I documented everything, I emailed it to Lucid, and I was like, "Look, is there anything I can do about this lease because this just doesn't seem right. No car should behave this way regardless of price and that a car that stickers for about 85,000 is behaving this way feels completely unacceptable. " Lucid, to their credit, completely agreed. Now, before I get into that, I just want to list off a few other failures I've experienced since my last video on the Lucid. The speakers and the audio system messes up frequently and in many different ways. Sometimes the speakers don't work at all. Sometimes they work, but they sound very tinny, almost like you're in cell phone talking mode, but the car's playing music and you're not on the phone. Sometimes only the rear speakers play music and the front speakers don't play anything even though the balance is centered. And again, the music pauses all the time even when you have full cell signal. The speakers are a mess. Another time, and this is crazy, while I was skiing, the Lucid app used 46% of my new iPhone 17's battery in a single day. 46% and that was almost entirely background activity with on-screen activity of just a single minute. All right, and let's compare this to another app I was using that exact same day. The entire time I was skiing, it was tracking me, so 5 hours of GPS usage with that app and it used 7% of the battery. So, somehow the Lucid app just absolutely drains your cell phone battery. There was a time the heated seats just kept turning off. There was a time you couldn't put it in drive. It's like the car thought it was plugged in even though it wasn't, so you couldn't put it in drive or reverse even though your phone is connected and everything else about the car works. My point of all this, even though I laid out a story from just a single weekend, which was my personal breaking point, the experience has consistently been buggy. To me, there's no other way to describe it than the car feels broken. So, after that weekend, I emailed Lucid, and they came up with a plan. They decided that they were going to take my car back, they would get me in a new Air, and I'd simply continue to pay my lease payments, but hopefully the new car would work out better. That was all

fine by me. I just wanted a car that worked. Now, I must say, I really felt like this plan was basically a lose-lose for Lucid, because let's say the new car doesn't work well, okay, then they look terrible. But then let's say the new car does work out really well, then everyone's going to be like, "Well, yeah, they just found a perfect one and gave it to you. " And personally, I don't think that's how software works, but I get that would kind of be what people would think. Regardless, I respect Lucid for acting here and trying to do the right thing. All right, so there it was. We had our plan. I would return my Lucid Air basically immediately. While Lucid was tracking down a replacement vehicle for me, they said they'd provide me a Gravity as a long-term loaner. And then once they found a suitable replacement vehicle that closely matched the spec of my car, they'd send me that, I give the Gravity back, and off we go. All right, so I said, "Sounds great. " Lucid said, "Sounds great. " We proceed, but it turns out it just doesn't work like that. I was told that things are a little messy, because from what I believe is a legal standpoint, in order for my lease payments to remain the same, I would have to have my car replaced with an identical spec vehicle. Now, Lucids have a decent number of options, which means there's a large number of build variants that you could have. I quickly calculated it to something like over 4,600 different unique builds just based on the Lucid Air Touring. So, this is a low-volume company, and they have a decent number of options, so basically finding an exact match wasn't going to happen. So, then Lucid pretty much told me I have one option. They said they're going to buy the car back entirely, paying for every payment I've made on it, and if I wanted, I could buy a new Lucid, start a new lease, but that's completely separate from what's going on here. I decided not to replace it with another Lucid Air for three reasons. First, the price has gone up. My monthly lease payment was about 865. I priced out an equivalent vehicle with the exact same lease terms, and the estimated payment is now 1130, a $265 per month increase for basically the exact same car. I don't want to pay more for the same thing. Second, that means starting the lease term all over again. At this point, I don't want another 3-year lease. Of course, I could do a shorter term, but that skyrockets the monthly lease cost. It'd be something like 1440 a month. I'm not interested. And third, I haven't had a great experience with this car. I love this car on paper, and I love the way it drives. Dynamically and practically, it's an awesome car, but I don't want to risk spending a bunch more money and having the same bad software experience. So, Lucid is buying the car back, and that's that. Now, out of Lucid's kindness, they said they were still happy to provide me a long-term Gravity loaner. I've never driven one. I don't yet have a replacement vehicle for this, and so I thought, "Great. " They also made a lot of changes with the Gravity as well versus the Air. So, I'm looking forward to seeing if the experience has been improved with the Gravity versus my Air. And here it is, the Lucid Oh, uh — Snapper's broken. There we go. The Lucid Gravity Touring. Now, here's what I'll say. I'm not going to rush into a review with this. I'm going to live with it. I'm going to document my experience, and once I've had it for a good long while, I'll provide a proper review of what it has been like to live with. And this isn't something entirely new to the channel. I've done a long-term loaner before, and I think it's a great way of giving a more comprehensive review. And I do think there's a lot to look forward to. It's another exercise in Lucid's packaging and efficiency genius, but we shall see. Now, I just quickly want to address something that I imagine will be in the comments, and it is a sentiment that I pretty much agree with. Effectively along the lines of like, "Hey dude, must be nice. " Like, "Of course Lucid's buying your car back because you're a popular YouTuber. " Uh and I just want to say, "Wait a minute. Did you just say pop- popular? Me? But like, let's all be honest for a moment. This was very likely a much easier process for me to have happened simply because of having this channel. But the alternative is what? Like, keeping this car that is a constant headache because it's frequently bugging out? And look, like, I don't have the data, right? All I have is my own experience. But to me, anyone who's experiencing as frequent and as diverse software failures as I am for a car that's sticker price is about $85,000, absolutely should have options as far as either getting rid of the car or getting it repaired or replaced because this was not an acceptable ownership experience as Lucid themselves have readily admitted. And so, I feel like I have to acknowledge that yes, this was easier for me to navigate due to my profession, but also that I'm very appreciative of Lucid for just doing the right thing. You might just say they understood the

gravity of the situation. Oh, jeez. — All right. So, here is a bonus bug, and I call it a bug, it's probably more a feature. After a certain amount of time of just having the frunk and trunk open, they will no longer close with any of the buttons. Seems to be like 10 minutes or so, you can no longer close them. So, if you're packing up your vehicle for a trip, suddenly none of the buttons work anymore. And I say it's a feature, not a bug, because it does this very consistently. It's a known thing. Uh and so, I'm just going to show you with this camera right here as I walk around pushing the buttons so you can see that I actually am pushing the buttons uh and that they do absolutely nothing. So, here we have the trunk button. Pushing that, of course, it does not close. Then, we'll go up to the frunk. You can see the button right there. Pushing that, it does nothing. Now, there are other ways to close these things, right? So, I can come in here. Here's the frunk close button. So, I push that. Of course, nothing happens. And then, you can always use the app, right? So, here we've got the app. I'll hit close frunk, confirm. It'll spin for a little while. Spinning, thinking, thinking, thinking. And eventually, it will tell you that didn't work. Try again. Okay, so the app tells you that didn't work, you should try again. So, to me, the customer, all I can think is right? Like, oh, I have done I've done something isn't working right. I just need to try it again. It doesn't tell me, "Hey, it's intentionally doing this. " So, you know, you keep trying. Now, even if you go in here and I put my foot on the brake pedal, and then I put the car in reverse, it says, "Close door and trunk for a full view. " Door open, trunk open, but again, even after the car's on and ready to drive, you push that button, nothing happens. None of these buttons work anymore. So, you have to manually close them, and it's like okay, I have to manually close it, but how is that How is it different for me looking in the frunk, seeing this button, and saying, "Hey, I'm trying to close it. " than just coming up and forcing this close like this? Like, I don't understand why that button no longer can work because it's like, "Well, I have to come over here and look at what's going on in the trunk. " So, it's not like, "Oh, I left it for a while, a cat crawled in or whatever. " It's like, "Well, you have to see in the trunk to push these buttons. " And yet, you know, you can just walk over, hey, not look inside, and just be like, "Oh, well, that didn't go down. I'll just push it down. " So, it seems like it's some sort of weird safety feature, but it's like the app doesn't let you know, and also, sometimes after you've if you hit this trunk button again to open it, and this time it's worked fine, great, but sometimes it won't. Sometimes it'll get like kind of caught up like it doesn't know where it is on that position sensor, and so it just opens a little bit, you have to hit it again, it opens up a little bit more. And so, it's like this timeout thing that just completely defeats all of the buttons to open and close the trunk and frunk. And it's like, why? It's just frustrating. So, every time you pack, manually close, manual close, and then sometimes the trunk will mess up because of that. Cool.