LCHCS stuck at 12A

I have a charger at home again. I removed the Lucid LCHCS and replaced the old one that hasn't failed me in ~10 years.

Lucid CS stopped communicating (via email) with me about 10 days ago. I called them yesterday, but the team that I needed to talk to was out for Juneteenth, and not expected to return until Monday. As an all EV family who drives a lot, being constrained to 3.8 kW was just not a workable option and I was tired of waiting for CS/TS.

If Lucid won't accept it as a return, I'm going to see if I can't get the State of Charge Youtube channel to review it. I've known Tom for years. He'd be doing me a solid to review this boat anchor.

Hope he does, I'd be really curious to find out what was wrong with it.

I’m sure they’ll accept it if it’s defective.

So the saga comes to a close. Lucid is taking the unit back, but not "refunding" me my referral points back.

I strongly suspect the only problem is that the unit is expecting 2AWG wire, does a voltage drop test, and then derates to a lower amperage if the voltage drop is outside a certain range. I did ask customer service this question directly several times, but was ignored. If they would have answered the question,I would have rewired using 2AWG,but, I wasn't going to spend a few hundred dollars on wire if I didn't have reassurance that it would fix the problem.

In the end, they would prefer to return he unit rather than answer the question. They were fully prepared to give me my money back,but when they realized it was "just points" tobe returned, they refused. I thought about just selling the unit, but, couldn't know for certain that it actually worked.

This customer service experience reminds me of the scene from the movie Roxanne when CD (Steve Martin) says "I have a dream. It's not a big dream, it's just a little dream. My dream - and I hope you don't find this too crazy - is that I would like the people of this community to feel that if, God forbid, there were a fire, calling the fire department would actually be a wise thing to do. You can't have people, if their houses are burning down, saying, "Whatever you do, don't call the fire department!" That would be bad."

knewman said:

Hope he does, I'd be really curious to find out what was wrong with it.

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ACtually, Lucid has already given Tom a LCHCS to test, but he has more EVSEs to test than he has time to test them -- my guess is he probably never will, although he might be keen to see if he can get his to limit itself to 12A the same way I think mine did.

Without a refund I would gave asked to keep the unit and sent it with a note to Tom so maybe he'd test it.

geosynch said:

So the saga comes to a close. Lucid is taking the unit back, but not "refunding" me my referral points back...

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That's a surprisingly poor response from Lucid.
I actually don't think it's likely that the LCHCS derated its current due to that 1V drop. My own LCHCS sees a ~3V drop when charging at its setpoint of 48 amps and works just fine.

Pragmatic said:

Without a refund I would gave asked to keep the unit and sent it with a note to Tom so maybe he'd test it.

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Tom didn't want it, as he had one already.

He agreed my problem was most likely using 6AWG wire, but no way to tell without testing. I was not going to spend $15/foot for 15 feet a wire without some assurance that was go to fix the problem. That was on me, but, I'm still annoyed.

geosynch said:

Tom didn't want it, as he had one already.

He agreed my problem was most likely using 6AWG wire, but no way to tell without testing. I was not going to spend $15/foot for 15 feet a wire without some assurance that was go to fix the problem. That was on me, but, I'm still annoyed.

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You should escalate. They should refund the points.

DeaneG said:

That's a surprisingly poor response from Lucid.
I actually don't think it's likely that the LCHCS derated its current due to that 1V drop. My own LCHCS sees a ~3V drop when charging at its setpoint of 48 amps and works just fine.

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Oh, wow. I wish I had known that. And yes, I thought it was an extremely poor response from customer care.

But, it is done now.

geosynch said:

So the saga comes to a close. Lucid is taking the unit back, but not "refunding" me my referral points back.

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I don't understand what this means. You can send it back to Lucid and they'll do nothing in return? How is that different than throwing it in the trash?

L-Dude said:

I don't understand what this means. You can send it back to Lucid and they'll do nothing in return? How is that different than throwing it in the trash?

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Right. They'll do nothing in return. They did offer me a new one, but, I had had enough. So you are correct -- sending it back was the same as throwing it in the trash.

Problem is, I can't even throw one of those cardboard tubes from an empty paper towel roll in the trash -- I have to recycle it. Yeah, I'm that kind of guy, so... I sent it back.