Whoa, I wasn't expecting this many replies after simply updating folks on my own situation with Lucid. I was trying to be objective and let folks who've been in my position know what the outcome was, no need to accuse me of lying.
Yes. Arrogant and belittling. You are the second person who had that experience and noted how irritated the BBB is with Lucid. I’m the third that I know of.
They chastised both me and the BBB saying that it’s outrageous to say that the time spent waiting for parts, or “administrative time” count towards lemon law. It was such a condescending and aggressive letter it made sure I would never deal with Lucid again. Many excuses it was just pathetic and as a customer I have never been treated so badly.
The sales team and one of the service members at my dealership were great. Two other service members, as well as the entirety of Lucid's corporate team that they sent to argue against me at arbitration, were extremely condescending towards both me and the program arbitrator but fortunately also completely inept.
Wow, I wonder how this will pan out with litigation versus arbitration. I cant be the only owner that had opted out and hired an attorney to deal with it.
To be honest, if I could go back I would have went your route, litigation, because in hindsight I have such detailed evidence, logs, screenshots and photos that I feel confident I would've won, in addition to covering my moral damages. As it is, with arbitration, I only won the end of the lease, and even then I had to pay the excess KM prorated (which is fair). In litigation I probably would have had the excess fees (and my legal fees) reimbursed upon winning. But here in Quebec, you can't do both, and I (foolishly) thought that Lucid would see the forest for the trees and make everything right (despite months of evidence to the contrary) so I gave them the benefit of the doubt and stuck with arbitration.
Don't be. I *only* shop for range and price for my electric vehicle, and my EV4 has more real-world range than my Lucid Air. If your vehicle is your whole personality, touch grass. I mean damn, my neighbor's Vinfast VF9, which he got at the same time I got my Air, has been rock solid compared to my Lucid at half the price.
It’s ludicrous to expect Lucid to just cave in during arbitration. Of course they will fight you. Think they will just roll over?
There's a difference between "fighting you" and "lying through their teeth to avoid taking responsibility for their actions". It was hilariously painful to see them remain quiet after I disproved their umpteeth claim.
It would be interesting to see the transcript of the entire arbitration.
I do have all of these, living in a single-party right-to-record province, however I won't be sharing them.
Yup. I suspect this is a “there are three sides” situation
Sure, totally. The customer who got screwed over by Lucid, the company that was too arrogant to admit they can make a mistake, and the arbitrator who was witness to all of this. Pretty simple.
Lucid really missed something important. The car is now plagued with a "Lemon Title" that will follow the car forever and anywhere in Canada and might not be resealable (even in U.S ?) Who wants an official lemon registered car ? Here in Canada and mostly in Québec the consumer protection law are really strong and will deeply protect the consumer first. That means that on 3 strikes, the constructor have already one out before any earing. For a lease car, taking back the contract, and have a clean title, would have been way less damaging for Lucid (my math and can be wrong) but for the company's image it is really really bad. Hiring a lawyer (who knows nothing about the car's systems) and letting him bullshitting the court didn't work (obviously) for Lucid. Strike 2...
@ LucidGoosey being well prepare for the cause goes straight to strike 3...
Sorry Lucid ! Of course there is always 2 versions on story like that and having the complete transcript would be interesting but bottom line... who lost...
Reading about anything on Lucid here and wherever else, I don't understand how so many Air are really good (mine for example) and so many seem to be really bad ? Didn't they all came from the same factory?
So, because I went with arbitration, they were not forced to mark the car as a "lemon". I do feel badly about this because the car *is* not only a lemon, but a deathtrap.
Don't understand gas killers comment. If the car meets the the lemon law criteria, why in the world would Lucid fight this in arbitration. In fact why go to arbitration to begin with. Lucid has the history of the car and knows if it is a lemon law car or not, so all it does is just make bad press for Lucid. Lucid knows whether their car is a lemon or not based on their ability to try to fix it multiple times but could not, so I just don't understand the logic of fighting a case you know you are going lose which is terrible image for the brand . Take the back, apologize, give him or her a new car and they may yet salvage some good will. Why fight a case you know you are going to lose. Where is the common sense here.
Ok, so this is the crux of the issue. Even after I was towed a couple weeks into ownership due to the dreaded "Drive System Failure", I still was patient, understood their explanation, accepted the repairs, etc, everyone was happy. But then the frunk/stranded situations started happening, and the GPS / Radio / 4G started regularly failing, and the app could no longer find the car, and the trim started falling off around the vehicle, and the wheels became misaligned 3x a years, instead of addressing these they went back and forth between laughable excuses ("you can't park outside when it's snowing, snow can enter the vents on the frunk... you live in a rural area, we can't guarantee 4G (my cellphone has 5 bars here)... it's a 6000-7000lb car so it's normal that you need to align it more (like, it takes two seconds to google that the car weighs 4500lbs)... if the trim falls off again we won't cover it because the cold weather degrades the tape and glue..."). I simply stopped trusting them when they proved to be untrustworthy. They had *dozens* of opportunities to make things right before arbitration litigation, and ignored all of them in favor of ****ing over their customer to keep their KPIs / service numbers / performance evaluations up. Bad faith is bad faith, you can't hand-wave facts away.
Then, when the ADAS started actively trying to kill me by sending me into oncoming traffic regularly, I was done.
Spite? Narcissism? Refusal to accept reality? Being so caught up in their own ego that they can’t accept anything short of total acceptance of what they want? Forcing the customer to fight them on every level to get what the law entitles them to?
1000000%. They made things annoying for me, but much, much, much worse for them. I can't imagine how many sales they lost here. I also opened up a dangerous vehicle file with Transport Canada that is currently under investigation because of the ADAS and frunk problem. I don't know how much it will cost them to prove to TC that the vehicles aren't deathtraps, but it's going to be a process for them. Never had to come to this.
They want the owner to feel discouraged and take a low goodwill offer they extend to them, as they did to you.
They really do try to do this.
True except for word of mouth to friends, relatives etc. Not a good strategy for the company. Bad faith especially when you know the car meets the lemon law requirements. Doing the right thing is always better for your image in the long run. Lucid hardly gains by putting barriers up when most people are going to win their case anyway. The majority of people who can afford to buy this car are those kind of people who will fight this if they do get a lemon. Lucid may win very few, but again its a bad vibe and word of mouth will hurt them more in the long.
It's hard to make a 10/10 brand promoter like I was fall to 1/10. It takes a lot of bad decisions, arrogance and fear of accountability. I must have talked half a dozen people out of getting a Lucid. And now I'm here talking about what I went through.
Who knows, maybe car software wasn’t updated in a timely fashion, or some other misuse by consumer.
I don't know what to respond to this. You're really reaching for straws here.
I am not doubting his evidence or his win, at all. I fully believe that the evidence was on their side and have no qualms with it at all.
That does not, in turn, mean that everything they say and/or recall is the whole entirety of the truth, either. For example, one simple reason is perspective; it is rare that anyone puts themselves in anyone else’s shoes.
That doesn’t take anything away from the facts of the case. And it doesn’t mean they’re being untruthful.
"Facts that were stated on the record" isn't "perspective". I have no horse in the race, I don't want Lucid to "fail", I don't hate the company or anyone there, I don't want to tarnish their reputation (they do a good enough job of that themselves)... but there are people here who had a similar (or worse) experience that I had and I just hope that my story helps someone navigate their situation, because it's extremely frustrating and unfair to have to go through hoops to get your rights asserted. I have no reason to lie or fabricate anything.
I'm not talking about a case where Lucid may have a valid reason to dispute the owner. I'm talking about the cases where Lucid knows the car is a lemon, has tried to fix the problems multiple times and has not been able to, knows that the owner is not at fault and yet Lucid continues to fight and obstruct a valid buy back whether in arbitration or not. A number of cases described previously in this thread fall into this category. So why is Lucid going into self-destruct mode, wasting lawyers fees, creating bad press and bad word of mouth when they are going to lose in arbitration anyway. I find it amazing that someone in the organization feels that this strategy will improve the image and help propel sales. Recognizing that some of its cars inevitably are going to be lemons and going out of their way to make it as easy as possible for either buy back or substituting a new car would go very far in reversing a bad situation and turning it into a positive. Its called turning lemons into lemonade.
So, on the calls with the arbitrator, Lucid
admitted they could see the logs where the failures occurred, down to the exact moment, GPS location, temperature, I mean, even turn signal status, etc. But they actually said "
even though we can see the logs, because we couldn't reproduce it during a test drive, we can't fix it". This was the crux of the arbitrator's decision. They had proof of the failures, but chose to do nothing about them.
Here are things they could've said that would've prevented this situation from going to a buyback:
"Hey, we recognize there's a problem, take this loaner until we sort things out."
"Hey, your car has had a lot of issues, we'll replace it. No need to go the legal route."
"Hey, here's a couple hundred bucks off your lease and we'll throw in lease protection and cover some excess KM, we value you as a customer and want to make up for your negative experience."
These are the things I'd offered in the past, on the other side of the table, when I was Global After-Sales manager for one of the largest powersports companies in the world. They are today considered to be the most consumer-friendly one.
I agree that it's bad practice to fight a losing case, as was apparently done here. But having spent way too much of my life sitting in conference rooms with corporate lawyers, I can imagine multiple reasons why they'd make the decision. They could have worried about disastrous impacts if it became known that dissatisfied owners could readily get buy-backs after 30 days in the backlogged service centers. They could have had a naive optimism that an OTA fix was about to convert a lot of unhappy owners to happy owners. It could have just been a disconnect between corporate and a hired-gun independent Canadian lawyer about the case's prospects. Or any of a number of other reasons.
A buyback was my last resort. They didn't need to let
things get so bad that we reached arbitration, though. They contested - poorly - and lost. They had plenty of opportunity to do the right thing for their customers, and
chose not too, whether through arrogance or spite or ineptitude or some of the worries you raise, or a combination of all of these.
These seem to be mostly minor software bugs…I’ve gotten a few in the past, but they go away.
You can’t expect Lucid to lemon a car just because you got a faulty warning or minor software glitches. Customers need to be reasonable in their requests. This is exactly why Lucid shouldn’t just accept every lemon car request.
"
ADAS regularly trying to murder you by throwing you across the yellow line into oncoming traffic" = "
mostly minor software bug". Got it.
Maybe some folks experienced what I went through and had a better experience. Maybe Lucid, or their local studio, treated them better and took care of all their issues in a respectful, honest and accountable manner. You probably won't hear as much from them on this forum, but you'll hear from folks like me, I get it. That doesn't make my experience false or fabricated. Lucid made a series of mistakes that ended up costing them exponentially more money and reputational damage than simply taking responsibility for their manufacturer defects and (admitted) design flaws would have required.
My Air was gorgeous, comfortable, drove amazing, and I loved the car when it wasn't stranded or otherwise falling apart. Now I drive a much uglier car at 1/3 the price but with far more range (especially in winter), and I'm much happier. I hope anyone out there fighting for their rights gets what they need.
