Drive System Fault Megathread

DeaneG said:

A month is too long. I'd give them another chance to do better - making it very clear that you're not happy.

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I wanted to give them another chance but have now decided to proceed with lemon law.
The customer care won’t give me a call or explanation about whats going on with the car.
They had it for a month and every time I tried to follow on a monday I got an assurance that someone would call on Thursday to discuss and i never got any call.
The communication has been extremely poor.
How should I gain confidence in their repair if they explain me what they are fixing. Its a safety related issue. If it was door latch or some software thing I would have passed but getting stranded on a highway is just not acceptable.

new owner said:

Model year 2025

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My 2024 is having this issue.

Luciyan said:

I m having navigation issues on my other lucid air. It shows the car is parked in some remote area when its parked in my garage. Is that similar to ur geofencing issue?

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Yes. And only intermittently.
I forgot what they replaced, but it was several communication items.

J17 said:

I took delivery of my Lucid Air Touring on December 16th. Aside from a squeaky steering wheel and the rear ventilation knob coming off (both of which were taken care of by the mobile tech), I hadn’t experienced any major issues — until a couple of weeks ago. That’s when I got a red warning message saying: “Drive system fault – contact customer service.” Lucid ended up towing the car on a flatbed to the Costa Mesa service center for further inspection.

It’s been about two weeks now, and I just received this update from my service advisor:

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Did you any countdown on the screen? Some guy on reddit is saying there is a 2 minute countdown before the car comes to a stop.
I just remember mine stopping very soon after the warning. I dont think there was any countdown. It just slowed down and went from 75 to 50 to 10 pretty quick.

Luciyan said:

I m having navigation issues on my other lucid air. It shows the car is parked in some remote area when its parked in my garage. Is that similar to ur geofencing issue?

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Does it show your car stuck at Lucid HQ? I had that issue. Service required to fix. Lost connection to GPS antenna.

Negan1000 said:

Does it show your car stuck at Lucid HQ? I had that issue. Service required to fix. Lost connection to GPS antenna.

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It’s intermittent like the other guy. Would show 50-100 miles away from the actual place. Sometimes in pacific ocean too. I used to take screenshots but then it started happening so often that i gave up.

Another Drive System Fault here, car is completely offline stuck in a parking garage in Flushing NY. Customer service is MIA. I should have sold the car the last time this shit happened. God I'm an idiot for trusting this company again

AbsoluteZenith said:

Another Drive System Fault here, car is completely offline stuck in a parking garage in Flushing NY. Customer service is MIA. I should have sold the car the last time this shit happened. God I'm an idiot for trusting this company again

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I am sorry that u have to go through it.
Lucids are lemons.
I am pretty sure they are not reporting all the faulty VINs. I got a recall letter from Lucid 2 months ago but I dont see it being reported online.

Like other owners on this thread, I experienced a Drive System Fault out of the blue. Immediately upon announcing the fault, my Air Touring STOPPED moving forward on a highway with no shoulder. I was able to coast 20 feet into a business' driveway and get most of the way off the road. This was a massive safety issue.

Long story short, Lucid has diagnosed a hardware issue with the rear drive and have the replacement part for repair. But this whole experience raises two key questions for me:
1. HOW does it make sense that there is zero warning before catastrophic failure? None whatsoever
2. WHY do our vehicles not have a "limp mode", as most boats do, enabling us to reach safety with limited system resources? In my case, apparently the front drove and other systems could have supported this.

Luciher said:

...1. HOW does it make sense that there is zero warning before catastrophic failure? None whatsoever
2. WHY do our vehicles not have a "limp mode", as most boats do, enabling us to reach safety with limited system resources? ..

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Depending on the type of failure, there is advance warning, and a limp-home mode. Your particular car's issue must have been more severe.

My experience the other day: #1 lane of a busy So. Cal. fwy at 0630 in the morning, and I got the "Drive System Fault" center dashboard display. The left of the same display indicated a stability error (which changed to "Automatic Vehicle Hold Fault" once stopped). As others have said, it went from 75 to 1mph in less than a minute. I barley made it to the shoulder. Customer service was solid and had a Lyft to me in 20 or so minutes. At CS direction, I left the car on the shoulder, and the Lucid-sent tow picked it up 90 minutes later; they took it to the service center where it sits now. I'm waiting for communication to find out what the issue is/was. It seems to be well documented on this thread, but posting to reiterate that if this happens, you are in trouble...get off the road asap.

Luciher said:

Like other owners on this thread, I experienced a Drive System Fault out of the blue. Immediately upon announcing the fault, my Air Touring STOPPED moving forward on a highway with no shoulder. I was able to coast 20 feet into a business' driveway and get most of the way off the road. This was a massive safety issue.

Long story short, Lucid has diagnosed a hardware issue with the rear drive and have the replacement part for repair. But this whole experience raises two key questions for me:
1. HOW does it make sense that there is zero warning before catastrophic failure? None whatsoever
2. WHY do our vehicles not have a "limp mode", as most boats do, enabling us to reach safety with limited system resources? In my case, apparently the front drove and other systems could have supported this.

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My AGT had a DSF on the interstate in Oct 2024 and all I could do was coast to the shoulder, unable to make it down the nearest exit ramp. There was no warning at the time, nor any prior faults/messages between the event and delivery. Service had to replace the entire Rear Drive Unit. Even with a dual-motor configuration, Limp Mode was not available because the Pyro Fuse disconnected the high-voltage pack from the drive system. A perfectly good Front Drive Unit is sitting there, but cannot be powered. Tow-required situations like this are so much more challenging on an interstate because the wrecking company has to be willing to perform a roadside service, which is inherently hazardous. Two tow operators got to my car and had to abandon the job because they weren't equipped with tire skates to move a vehicle that's completely dead and stuck in Park with the Parking Brake engaged. Finally a third tow company was contacted and picked up the car 39 hours after the DSF. It was a customer service catastrophe. I had to make 30-40 outgoing phone calls to coordinate the recovery; I received 6 or 7, one of which was actually helpful. I spent more time on the phone those two days than I had in the previous six months.

To this day, I do not know why the RDU failed. Riviera Service had no answers.

The best advice I can give for this scenario is to assume the Pyro Fuse is blown, and thus your high-voltage pack means absolutely nothing, and thus you should assume a 15-minute timer until the 12-volt batteries are depleted. This is your opportunity to lower/raise windows, open doors from the exterior, open the trunk/frunk, and most importantly, place the car in Neutral. I purchased a pair of chocks to keep the vehicle from rolling if I am ever unfortunate enough to encounter another DSF.

goshen said:

After almost 3 days of my AGT parked/idle at home, I was going to drive the vehicle to my son’s game tonight and alas, I got the “Drive system fault” error on the screen. And of course, the vehicle won’t drive. While, so glad and fortunate to be at home when this happened, this is indeed very scary. The last time I drove the vehicle was to an EA charging station and then to my local discount tire shop to purchase extended warranty on the tires. Current odometer mileage is 265 miles.

Luckily, customer service was still opened and they worked me through using the fob to reset the vehicle (press the C letter on the fob once) to put the vehicle to sleep and twice to wake it up again. I am a bit uncomfortable now to drive the vehicle until mobile service show up later in the week to diagnose. The one thing I am concerned about is them coming and not able to replicate or figure out what could have led to the issue.

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This happened to me. Good thing I stopped in the middle of a residential road like 1000ft from my house. Scary part was that I was on my way to pick up my daughter from school. Can’t even imagine what i wouldve done if it was on the freeway. Anyways. Took an hour of trouble shooting with lucid before they agreeed to send out a tow truck. Which took another 2 hours to get here. Again if I wasn’t next to home idk what I would’ve done.

I’ve had three drive faults warnings that necessitated the replacement of the battery( twice) and the front motor. The front motor was the most severe as there acceleration became lumpy and weak and I wasn’t sure if I would make the last two miles up the steep road to my house. But the Air persisted and got me home. The thing is there will be a range of severity with these events just like everything else. I’ve been stranded by my ice cars several times also. Fuel injection busted on a BMW 2002 Tii, alternator ( twice) on a BMW 3.0 csi , a flat on a merc E class that I couldn’t change as some bastard over tightened the lugs on the wheels. Bottom line is cars are complicated entities that we don’t give them credit when they do work well, carrying us for 40, 60, 80k miles with little or no trouble. We have forgotten just how fraught with peril driving used to be and now treat cars like refrigerators, just another appliance that hums along in the background forever. Well at least the older refrigerators

My drive system fault was deliberate as the Lin bus controlling the coolant to the rear motor failed so it put me into turtle mode to protect the rear motor and I was able to pull off the interstate and make it to a hotel using what was effectively front wheel drive motor only. If it something that stops the car dead with barely time to pull over that’s tough, but it makes sense if a fuse also failed disconnecting the HV battery making it so @Chrome couldn’t at least limp home in turtle mode like I could. In 42k miles that’s the only incident I’ve had in my Air requiring a tow.