Second-row seat safety warning — please read before folding/releasing this seat around anyoneWanted to add my experience to the other reports here, because I think this is more serious than it's being treated.
My wife was hit by the second-row seat release — hard. It caught her in the temple/eyebrow area, cut her open, and knocked her off her feet. She got up dazed, didn't fully register what had happened, and drove on to work. It wasn't until a coworker saw blood on her face that anyone realized how bad it was. She was later diagnosed with a concussion.
I'm attaching photos of the wound over the following days — you can see the puncture/laceration where the seat's edge caught her, and how deep the bruising went (that yellow-green discoloration is from blood pooling well beneath the skin, not just a surface bump). We're still waiting to see whether it's going to leave a permanent scar. This isn't a "startled and stepped back" injury — this is what real blunt-force impact looks like.
What worries me is the mechanism itself. I remember standing in the showroom watching the salesperson demo this seat and thinking even then that it moved with more speed and mass than I expected — no resistance, no gentle motion, just a fast, heavy swing. If you're not braced for it or aren't looking directly at it when it releases, you have almost no time to react.
My wife herself has said that given how hard she was hit — as a healthy adult who was knocked off her feet and concussed — she believes a child or an elderly person hit the same way could have been critically injured.
I did report this directly to Lucid. To their credit, they acknowledged the issue and offered to cover her medical bills — but as far as I can tell, nothing is being done to actually address the seat mechanism itself. No fix, no redesign, nothing beyond covering costs after the fact.
Why I think this deserves more attention:
- Kids are at exactly the wrong height to catch this in the face or skull, and don't have the reflexes to move out of the way in time.
- Seniors or anyone with balance issues can be knocked down by the force alone, on top of any direct impact — a fall on top of a head injury is its own serious risk.
- Anyone operating the release without a direct line of sight to who's behind/beside the seat is at risk of hitting them.
If you own one of these, please:
- Warn anyone in the vehicle before you activate the release.
- Never let kids stand near the seat's swing path while it's in motion.
- Keep a hand on it / control the motion manually if you can, rather than letting it go unassisted.
Lucid knowing about this and quietly paying medical bills isn't the same as fixing it. If you've had a close call — even without injury — please report it to NHTSA at nhtsa.gov/report-a-safety-problem. The more incidents on record, the harder this is to treat as a one-off rather than a design defect.
Glad she's okay. Please be careful with this seat.
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