Hey everyone,
For those of you who don't know me, I have been pretty active on the forums, been reserved for a Touring reservation since March of 2021
Meticulously searching and reading everything I could on Lucid, and awaiting my delivery.
I got lucky and found 2 AGT's for around $119k online, one happened to pop up right after the other, and the latter had the exact specs I wanted, color, interior combination choice, 19" tires, etc...
Talk about a stroke of luck?
I picked it up in DC and drove it back to Utah, about 2000+ miles.
I will outline the goods and the bads during my trip as well as problems/bugs along the way.
First thing I noticed when I was shown the car was that it was absolutely beautiful, I loved the Zenith Red with the Tahoe interior, it was my favorite choice and I am really glad I went with it. It changes color in the night and looks black from afar. The tri-color finish is complicated, but marvelous to look at.
From my test drive, I drove the exact same one, so things were very familiar.
The previous owner had put the black lug nuts on the wheels which is great because that's something I would've done. He also had the matching carpet 3rd party carpets, all weather honeycomb mats. They were also great.
We did our first charge in Virginia where plug and play worked immediately. I was able to hit 170 KW in charging and about 25 minutes later, I was at 85% and we went on our way. For the record, I never went above 85% during the whole road trip, just care too much about keeping the battery flawless, and I was find with making multiple stops along the way and truly enjoying the car.
So far charging experience was 10/10, I hit 17/18 chargers where plug and play worked, only the final charger in my own hometown didn't work because it needed to be initiated from the app.
However I was told by a Lucid rep who has used the same chargers that the 3rd station works on plug and play and the first didn't. So maybe I just needed to try another charger.
The drive was very smooth, I am used to Utah roads and so 75-80 mph is my norm.
I had it on highway assist about 80% of the time and it was a very smooth, centered, and delightful ride.
Road noise was very low, compared to my other cars I've driven, it's on another level, I've never been at 80+ MPH and had such a quiet cabin.
I know people complain about not having a hatchback and them going with this clamshell design, and also the inner door wells being so low (some people bump their heads a lot when getting in and out). But I don't mind because these design decisions is what's making it possible to have such a quiet interior experience.
No creaks or noises in the cabin, I am satisfied with all materials alcantara, leather, wood, and other materials used in the car. Sometimes I just sit there touching them.
I did notice though that when I was driving in 15 degrees weather, my knees would sometimes get cold, I think there's some air getting in through the cracks, but I wasn't able to quite pinpoint where.
As for the climate settings, my auto doesn't quite work, I have it set at 86 F but it failed to keep the cabin temperature warm. I would have to disable auto and manually put the fans on 4 or 5 on warm settings in order to really keep the cabin warm when it's 20 or below outside. On normal circumstances, auto works totally fine.
I also thought that Lucid had auto defrosters (some cars will automatically turn on defrosters when the windshield starts to fog up) but I didn't notice them.
I found out through these forums that the front camera and possibly the LIDAR has a defrosting strip that runs across it and so I will add that to my list of tools on my next drive.
Winter driving was a bit rough because in snow storms, the cameras and lidar would get covered constantly. Every half hour to an hour I would have to get out and wipe the cameras for highway assist to work.
I do find the ADAS system a little extreme, I haven't messed with the settings much because I do like to keep the annoying features in just in-case who knows when it might save me.
But at the same time, when lanes are fading or when there's construction, it's tough sometimes to fight against the car to stay in lane when that lane is ending and you need to follow a cone path. Or when the lane has faded and new paint has been drawn for a new lane, but the car sees the old lane instead of the new one and will try to keep you on that path. So I would fight with the car occasionally during those situations.
The camera inside the car that watches your eye is very useful, and in-fact did give me the coffee symbol or break symbol once during the trip, and I was pretty tired and swerved around a bit, so it was spot on. Found the nearest Electrify America and took a power nap while it charged.
Also for future travelers, the seats are comfortable and honestly had no issues sleeping in the car while charging. But it would be smart to plan a stop near a level 2 charger or destination charger so that you can sleep peacefully while you charge as you won't get hit with idle fees like at Electrify America.
Further on the camera watching you, if you move your steering wheel all the way up, it impacts the camera and you won't get those notifications anymore, which I discovered by mistake. Or you can turn it off in dreamdrive settings. But I was moving my steering while quite a bit because I couldn't find a happy medium between being able to see the cockpit screen (highway assist, speed limit, etc..) and also having the camera watch my eyes. So I was going back and forth because on long road trips, I like to have my steering position at the lowest settings, I grab it from the bottom and just stay steady and res my arms on the sides.
On highway assist if it would tell me to keep my hands on the wheels, I would literally just jiggle it left and right for a quick second and then it would go away. So I didn't find that annoying or excessive at all. Sensitivity was nice.
During the trip itself, I was hitting every charger I could to get juice to 80% at least before continuing. But by the middle of the trip, I was so comfortable with Electrify America that I was skipping 2 chargers at a time and arriving at chargers at 10-15% percent because Plug and Play was just so good!!!
The massage seats and seat warmers are excellent, I used them quite often. The seat warmers get extremely hot and I was on 1 or 2 settings most of the time. Heated steering wheel was really clutch during the 15 degree weather.
I was in Ohio and it was 15 degrees outside and I think that's where my frunk was having problems because it would not open, and after a while it did open but then wouldn't close properly (it wouldn't latch unless I put my hand on top), and since that time is where I had frunk issues. Lucid probably tested all different types of weather, but I wonder how cold they really went? But I prefer to use the trunk in cold weather rather than the frunk now.
Auto High beam was awesome and made one less thing I had to worry about.
I didn't notice the lights turning in the direction of my steering a lot, when you make a 90 degree turn, as you turn the wheels I remember reading in the owner's manually that the headlights will follow the wheel or where you're looking to go.
I didn't notice it that much to be honest, maybe my conditions weren't optimal.
The camera was a little weird, so the front facing camera is in the middle of the 2 chrome lips of the Lucid, but having the camera overlook from on top of the bottom lip makes it so that you can't accurate see the ground. The car will tell you that you are 5 inches away from a curb, in reality, you probably have another 5 inches or so. I noticed myself parking way further back than I thought I was. If youy put on Surround view, and look from the top, and turn your wheels all the way to the left or right, then you can kind of see the wheels. and it's a bit off from where the front camera thinks you are.
I am going to go into an empty parking lot and use some cones to dial in my front camera and learn to get better at reading the data.
The back leg room was phenomenal, it's crazy how much space is back there even when the driver and passenger is sitting comfortably.
I also noticed the driver seat reclines WAY more than the passenger seat. Not sure why that's the case?
One other thing that REALLY bothered me is that Lucid doesn't have an entry and exit mode on the car, I manually move my seat back every time I exit or enter the car, and noticed even the previous owner had a profile called 'exit' which had settings like steering wheel retraction, and seat moving back, etc... so he can get out of the car. And I'm not a tall person either.
The sun visor really bothered me. I don't know why they didn't just do it like the Model X and put it mounted to the side and when you wanted it put it up front, but having that suction cup thing is just weird and doesn't suit the full glass view you have. It seems like an obstruction, not sure. But I move it over 80% of the time as the first thing I do when I get inside of the car.
The blue tinting they did to the roof and front of the windshield I think is excellent, could be a tad bit higher, but never felt like I needed sunglasses because I think it did an excellent job blocking the sun and making it very comfortable to drive in all weather conditions. But if you're really tall, I can totally see it being a problem as the tint would be directly in your line of sight and then it would just be very annoying.
The navigation was not that great, I was using A Better Route Planner, and Google maps as a precaution. But I noticed sometimes Lucid would take me on roundabout roads and adding distance to my trip, maybe it didn't account for traffic? But sometimes it wouldn't even be clear about turns or showing arrows on exactly where to turn in. It was also a bit finicky in terms of zooming in on the car closer, and sometimes it would be pretty far away. It made it very difficult in cities like Chicago where there was a lot of bridges, tunnels, and it would thing I was on the bottom floor and not on the bridge. I can see similar things happening in New York City.
I maintained 3.2 mi/kw throughout my trip, but my last leg from Colorado to Utah increased that to 3.5 as it was mostly downhill.
I also didn't realize that Park City is higher than Colorado at a height of 6000' and so part of that travel was flat to even a uphill climb. But when going to SLC, it was definitely downhill where I was chilling on the freeway regenning and everyone else had their brakes pressed the whole time.
Very satisfying and smooth journey downhill as I expected. No more downshifting herky jerky.
On my drive DC to Utah, I noticed some Rivians, Ford F-150 Lightnings, Ioniq 5's, and VW ID.4's, but coming into Utah, I saw Fiskers, Polestars, Ford E-transit vans, GMC Hummers, Porsche Taycans, Jaguar I-pace's, Mercedes EQS, Ford Mach-e, Rivians, and even the Lucid rep who was there said he'd never seen such a diversity of EV's in his life which I thought was pretty funny.
And I still have yet to see another Lucid on the road. weird.
As soon as I got back, I gave the car to the detailer who put PPF on the car and ceramic coating, he said don't wash it for a week and it's a bad winter here right now. So I am waiting until next week to wash it and post some real pictures. IN the meantime, some photos of the drive.
