Owning A Lucid Has Been Super Disappointing

A front trunk that won't open, software that won't update, speakers that won't play music, coolant pumps that won't get up to speed, and generally speaking a myriad of software glitches that never stop surprising you. Less than six months ago I bought a brand new 2025 Lucid Air Touring. I bought it because I genuinely believe the Lucid Air is one of the best engineered vehicles the world has ever seen. They are some of the most efficient, quickest, best packaged, brilliantly designed vehicles with a team of extraordinarily talented engineers behind them. But at this point maybe that's just Stockholm Syndrome talking because as it turns out, life with the Lucid is a whole lot different than the brief stints for which I tried them out previously before buying one. The disappointment comes from several areas. Hardware issues, so physical things that don't work, software glitches, meaning unintentional software bugs, and software design limitations, so intentional software design choices that I disagree with. And after all of that we'll get into my single biggest complaint with this vehicle that drives me absolutely nuts. So let's start off with hardware because this thing has already been to service for multiple problems. So first off, every single time I try to open the frunk, the first time it would fail. It'd come up and it'd slam right back down. And then the second try it would open. But every single time you left the car and came back and then tried to open the frunk, it would never work the first time. Well service fixed that. One of the strikers was a little bit unaligned and so now it opens every time. The powertrain coolant pumps were not able to reach their target speed, so two of the drive unit coolant pumps were replaced. The left fan button was broken. The detent inside had failed, so they replaced this whole assembly. To me, these all seem like things that should have been caught at the factory upon inspection, or certainly at the showroom. But this is how it was delivered. I also thought the charging door was broken because when you push the button to open it, it doesn't do anything. But it turns out you just have to push really hard. Cool. All right now maybe I'm just weak, but this one's kind of funny. So the amount of force required to pull a can out of the cup holders in here is ridiculous. I actually measured it and I did it three times. It was very consistent and it varied between 8.82 and 8.89 pounds. Nearly nine pounds to pull an empty can out of the cup holder. Lucid, why does it have to be so hard to pull a can out of the cup holder? For reference, I did this in my Corolla and it measures 0.00 pounds and it holds a can just fine. All right, we've strayed from the point. Here's the big category. This thing is just riddled with software glitches and bugs. For the first three months that I owned this vehicle, every time I entered the car, every single time, the screen had a pop-up that said unable to install update. Then if you click the learn more button, it said that it was up to date and that no further action was required. Except that wasn't true. It was not up to date. It was behind on software and it could not update. It had to go into service in order to get this fixed. Sometimes the audio just doesn't work. So here you can see I have the turn signals on. I snap my fingers, which you can hear, but no turn signal noise. This is not something you can deactivate, but sometimes the entire audio goes down. So no speakers, no sound for the entire drive and this has happened at least five times already. Car play can become painfully annoying. It frequently switches which phone it's connected to and which phone is connected to which profile. So I would be driving, but it would connect to my wife's CarPlay account. This required a complete factory reset in order to get it to work again, which takes about an hour to redo all of your settings. Another example, I was standing in my yard listening to music from my phone on my AirPods and my wife drove by and as she drove by, it yanked my phone and pulled it to her car. So it started playing my music in the car and stopped playing it in my headphones, despite it being connected to her key. And sometimes my wife's phone key literally just stopped working as a key. And this is crazy because the display would show that it is connected to her phone and the display would also say there is no key detected. So you have to carry around the card as a backup key wherever you go. This also required a factory reset to fix in order to get her phone to work as a key again. All right, now I'm skeptical to mention this one, but I have no idea how it happened. So I was on a road trip about a three hour drive with my dog and my dog was sitting in the back right seat and he started to become uncomfortable. And so I checked the climate controls like what the heck, why is he so uncomfortable? And it turns out his heated seat was on high. And I was like, well, that's weird. How the heck did that turn on? So I turned it off. Well, he stays back here and he is uncomfortable. Initially when we got this car, he was really uncomfortable with it. And so he would lean himself hard against the back of the seats. He wouldn't come anywhere near the front. Now there are some buttons right here, which you can use to turn on the heated seats. But again, he didn't like the car and he was always pressing himself against the back seats. So I have no idea how these possibly could have been touched. And two more times on that drive, this heated seat turned on full and he gets uncomfortable. And I'm like, what the heck? Only to go look at the climate control settings and the heated seat is on three times on a three hour drive. I have no idea how it happened. Another time I simply could not lock the car using the phone app and the car wouldn't automatically lock itself as I walked away. So I'm trying to lock the car with the app. It doesn't respond, doesn't work at all. The door handles are still popped open. The car's unlocked, the car's on. I go inside, I wait 10 minutes. I come back outside. The car is still on, still unlocked, still just sitting there, will not lock automatically. No idea. But sometimes it does the opposite and it'll automatically lock the car when you're right beside it. So for example, you'll come up to the car, it'll unlock, you'll open the door, put your dog in the back, close that door, and then the car locks itself. And so you have to open your phone, open the app, unlock the car just to get in the front seat, even though you literally just approached the car, opened the door and closed it. Sometimes CarPlay doesn't work. And this is crazy because in the car it'll show that it's connected to your phone, it'll show that Bluetooth is connected, and it'll say in order to get CarPlay going you need to connect your phone via Bluetooth. And it's like, it is connected! Another time CarPlay did not work for three full days. This is because the car said to connect your device wirelessly, turn on Bluetooth connectivity. But no matter what you did, Bluetooth would not turn on. And even though the car still recognized your phone as a key, it could not turn on Bluetooth. And so CarPlay didn't work for three full days. Alright, and not that I ever expected it to work the first time, but this car does have plug and charge. So you're supposed to be able to go up to an EA station, you set up plug and charge on the app, which I did. I set it up online. I plug in the car at an Electrify America station to charge it. It does not recognize the car whatsoever. Everything had to be done manually. Alright, now this is a minor one, and it's kind of funny, but one time the display told me that the speed limit was 85 miles per hour, when in fact it was 55 miles per hour. So that one was actually kind of cool. By the way, nowhere in the entire state I was driving in is there a speed limit of 85 miles per hour. Finally, the garage door opener is a huge pain to program. So you absolutely need brand new batteries in your garage door opener that you use to program the car. And even then, I had to go through three of these until I got one that worked with this car in order to program it, despite all of them opening my garage doors no problem. And again, not a huge deal if it eventually works, but sometimes you have to do a factory reset, and that means reprogramming these each time. And it doesn't work. It's really hard to program it. So it's quite annoying when you have to do a factory reset. And the garage door opener isn't that successful. I'd say it's at about a 75% success rate of when you push that button, it actually opens or closes the garage. I have modern, nice garage door openers. All right, so we've talked about software glitches, but now let's talk about design choices. So things about the software that I think should be designed differently. First, if you swap driver profiles, it cancels your navigation. So allow me to explain this. You're on a road trip. You've been driving for a good while. You're getting tired, so you want to swap drivers. Well, new driver gets in. Of course, they want their settings. They swap to their profile, so they get their steering mirrors, etc. But boom, the navigation is deleted. The history is deleted. So you can't see where you were headed. You have to re-find it, and it becomes a tedious, unnecessary step. Number two, the reverse mirror tilt. I absolutely love this feature in my old Tesla. So in the Tesla, when you put the car in reverse, it takes both mirrors, it turns them slightly in and slightly down, so you can see the side of the car and the curb. So it makes it really nice for parallel parking, and it makes it really easy to back into a single car garage door. Great. But what does Lucid do? Well, Lucid only adjusts one mirror, the right side mirror, and they tilt it basically all the way down, so it's just staring at the ground. It becomes a useless thing to look at because it's just looking right at the ground, and you can't adjust it. Lucid, allow for the driver to select where the mirrors look when they put the car in reverse. Please. It would be such a huge improvement. All right, here's one that makes me feel like I'm insane, because like in most EVs, you can choose whether you want the battery to display how many miles you have left, or what battery percentage you have remaining. Now, personally, miles remaining is a meaningless number. I don't like it. It doesn't actually tell me how many miles remaining I have, so I prefer looking at battery percentage. Great. I select battery percentage, but then when I navigate somewhere, it tells me on the screen right here, and you cannot change this. It tells you what you will arrive with in miles remaining, even though you've selected percentage, and I asked Lucid about this. I said, why do y'all do this? And they said, well, that's just how it is, and it's like, yeah, but why am I choosing percentage if it's still going to show me miles remaining? Am I nuts? Is that me? Another one, the voice command is essentially useless, and so this is true of pretty much every car out there that isn't a Tesla, but I thought because this is kind of an evolution of a Tesla that perhaps it would work, but it does not. You can tell it to go to a location in a specific city in a specific state, and it will still direct you to a completely different state. It's like it has no idea about proximity, and the voice command for navigation drives me crazy, but here's something funny about it. I'm going to tell it to open the glove box. Open the glove box. I can't open the glove box for you, but you can do it by pulling the handle. What's funny about that is that there is no handle, so the thing's just lying to me. To open the glove box, you have to use the button on the touch screen. Next, the cross traffic alert seems far too sensitive, so I can be sitting at a stoplight. I've got a red light in front of me, and cars, as they should be, are driving along in front of me, and the cross traffic alert is going off and saying, don't pull out into traffic. There's cars coming, and it's like, yeah, I'm at a stoplight, and the light's red. If it was green, maybe I'd have concerns. And finally, depending on your phone, the phone app can really drain your battery. Now, I have a newer phone, and it doesn't seem to be a huge deal, but my wife has an iPhone 13, and if you want to keep the app open, which makes it the easiest so that the phone actually works as a key as you approach and leave the vehicle, if you leave the app open, it has taken as much as 35% of her battery in a single day. All right, so I've listed out quite a few problems, but I still haven't told you what I find to be the single most annoying issue with this car. This one example just beautifully illustrates the combination of software and hardware problems that this car has. My biggest issue, you cannot change driver profiles while driving. Now, this sounds simple, but hear me out. Both my wife and I drive this car regularly. We each have our own driver profile, and that includes your seat position, mirror position, steering wheel position, and driver settings. Now, Lucid, they're pretty smart, so they've designed two ways that the car will automatically recognize who is driving, so you don't have to select your driver profile every time you enter the car. One of those ways is your phone, which works like a key. The car recognizes who is entering the car and automatically switches to that profile, except that it really doesn't, because if both of you are entering the car, it feels like a coin toss which phone it's going to pull from and thus load their driver profile. And I'm sure there is some possible way to know that this phone is on this side of the car entering the vehicle versus another phone is on the other side of the car entering the vehicle. So, the phone key doesn't work accurately if two people are getting in the car, but no worries. Lucid thought about this. When you sit in the car, they have a face scanner behind the steering wheel so they can use biometrics to determine who just got in and switch to their driver profile. Well, the problem is the scanner is mounted too low. Because I'm tall, I have the steering wheel mounted to the highest position so that I can fully see the display behind the steering wheel, but in that steering position, the biometric scanner is completely blocked by the wheel. It is hard mounted behind the steering wheel and you can raise the steering wheel into a position that completely blocks it. So, a hardware design choice is making a software function completely worthless. So, what does this mean? Well, if my wife and I both enter the car, it has no idea who's driving and so I have to manually select my profile. But let's say my mind is on something else. We're talking, I get in the car and I just drive off. I also live near a highway, so I get on it really quickly. But then, whoops, now I notice I'm on my wife's driving profile. The seat, steering, and mirrors are all wrong. Well, I cannot switch to my profile while I'm driving, so now the display is blocked because the steering wheel is lower and my mirrors are wrong. Now, in a normal car with normal buttons, this wouldn't be a huge deal. You'd adjust the steering and mirrors and go on about your day. But here, it's all done on the touchscreen, so it's basically impossible unless you're willing to be heavily distracted as you use a touchscreen to tediously adjust your steering wheel and your mirrors. And, if you accidentally save those settings, now you've saved them to the other person's profile and you've messed up the profiles. So, it's a case of, okay, you got rid of a lot of buttons. Great. If the software actually works, fine. Like, in a Tesla, it can do that. Also, in a Tesla, you can switch driver profiles while driving. But here, because it doesn't work well, because the software doesn't work well, and you don't have physical buttons to adjust it, it's the worst of both worlds, and it's very frustrating. Now, you might say, Jason, well, that's on you. You didn't look at which profile was selected before you drove off. Fair point. But guess what? It gets worse. Let's say I did notice that my wife's profile was selected, so I switched to mine. Well, it doesn't always load all of the settings. So, if I switch profiles, maybe it adjusts the mirrors, but it doesn't adjust the steering wheel. And so, you drive off thinking you're in the right profile and that everything will load correctly, but it just doesn't. You get a mix of the two profiles. And so, now you're driving and you can't do anything about it because you have to park in order to switch profiles. And this happens frequently enough that it makes you rethink your life choices of how you ended up here. Now, I brought this up with Lucid, and they said their legal department is the reason behind this. Because if you selected someone else's profile, say someone who was really tall, and it moved their seat all the way back, and you're really short, and now your feet can't touch the pedals, well, that's a problem. But the alternative is that you have to now adjust the settings through a touchscreen. Incredibly distracted driving, that's the safe alternative. And the profile selection process is a three-step process. So, it's super unlikely you do this accidentally. But I don't know, maybe add another step that's like, are you sure? Because as is, it's simply not acceptable. Or if the seat moving back is that big of a legal concern, perhaps allow for the steering and the mirrors to change, but not the seat. Because the seat is really easy to adjust. There's a button right there. Okay, anyways, long rant, but that single issue highlights numerous flaws with both the hardware and the software that's simply not acceptable for a vehicle that's been out this long. Now, you might say a lot of this stuff can be fixed with software. And that's true. But reminder, for the first three months, my car could not update its software. But once it did, I thought, okay, maybe now finally things will be better. And then I drove my dog about two miles to drop him off at a sitter. Here's what happened on that very short drive. First problem, it only half loaded my driver profile settings. So the steering wheel is low and blocks my view of the display. No sweat. I park, switch to my wife's profile, switch back to my profile. This takes about a minute by the way. But finally, my settings all load. Great. Except while switching profiles, it's disconnected from Apple CarPlay. So now it says I need to reconnect Apple CarPlay. So I get that reconnected and I go on about my drive. And when I'm about half a mile from the dog sitter, the screen just goes black. I lose my navigation and touching the screen doesn't do anything. So I lost navigation for the remainder of the drive. This all happened in the course of two miles in a car that has been out for about four years now. There is no reason the software should be this bad, this late in its development. Here's some other things that have gone wrong while on their latest software. No sound, no speakers, no turn signal noises. This has happened multiple times. Frozen navigation. The navigation screen shows a map, but the map is just frozen. And I'm in a city with excellent reception, no tall buildings around, just a frozen screen. And this frozen screen remained after parking the car, going to dinner, coming back, getting back in the car, and it reloaded the frozen map. Recently, the car never turned off while I went grocery shopping. So I come out of the grocery store and I see my car far away. The lights are still on. The door handles are popped out, which means it's unlocked and it's on. And it's just been sitting there unlocked and on the whole time I was grocery shopping. Awesome. But good news, one time on the new update, it actually recognized my face. So I was excited about this because my wife's steering wheel position is lower. So the sensor can actually see me. And it saw me and it switched to my profile. But then it didn't move the steering wheel. So close. But to end on a lighter note, I got a parking ticket. And I love this parking ticket for two reasons. First, because it lists the make as unidentifiable, which is hilarious because... But second, my first major complaint with this car is that they call this paint blue. And it is obviously not blue. It is obviously gray. And thanks to this parking ticket, I now have proof. It says color gray. Amazing. This car, by a large margin, is the most expensive vehicle I have ever purchased. And this car, by an enormous margin, is the most frustrating vehicle I have ever owned. I have a cheap Amazon USB stick that if your car has wired CarPlay, it turns it into wireless CarPlay. And I use this on my Ford Maverick. And this thing has been bulletproof. Far more reliable than the CarPlay in my Lucid. I'll link to it in the video description if anyone's interested. The thing's honestly awesome. But like what? A cheap little Rando brand USB stick on Amazon? It's just a shame to me. Because I do think this car looks great. And it drives great. Has great range. Has great practicality. Has absolutely brilliant engineers that have developed it. But the software, unfortunately, is anything but great. And everything I've discussed in this video has happened within the approximately 3,000 miles of driving that I've put on it. Not very many. So, hopefully, in the future, with the software, they are able to address many of these issues and fix a lot of the drivability and livability issues with this car. But again, this thing's been out for 4 years. And currently, it's pretty frustrating to live with. If you own a Lucid, I would love to hear from you if your experience with your car has been similar or different. If I've been really unlucky. If I'm just crazy. Anyways, thank you all so much for watching. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. How big is the battery in this car? I do not know the exact battery size without more details about the model. Can you tell me which Lucid model you have? I have a Lucid Air Touring. The Lucid Air Touring has a 75 kWh battery. It's super cool and helps you go far. Why did you tell me that the Lucid Air Touring has a 75 kWh battery pack when this actually has a 92 kWh battery pack? I apologize for the mistake. The Lucid Air Touring actually has a 92 kWh battery pack.