Here was the timeline of my order in tedious detail. The email asking Dream reservation holders to configure and confirm their order arrived in my inbox the morning of September 20. I confirmed my order within an hour. Later that afternoon my sales rep called me to congratulate me on responding so quickly, telling me I was among the first to do so and that she had already assigned me to a Delivery Advisor who would be contacting me shortly. I was on a walk when she called, and by the time I got home I had an email from my Delivery Advisor about scheduling our first phone call. We scheduled for 8:00 a.m. PDT the next morning, September 21. During that call I asked her what role my reservation date (September of 2018) would play in scheduling the production of my car. She said the production schedule would be based on the order in which final orders were confirmed with a Delivery Advisor, which we were doing in that call. She added that our call was among the first being made. However, she also told me that production (not deliveries) would not begin for 2-4 months.
I asked her specifically when VINs would be assigned. I was particularly interested, as two friends had recently ordered a VW ID.4 and a Mustang Mach-E, and I had taken delivery a month earlier on a Model S Plaid. All of us had been given our VINs when the cars entered production, thus giving us a rough gauge on when to start the delivery countdown. She told me that Lucid would not assign the VIN until the end of production.
During the Production Week Preview event a week following this call, Ashoka8350 noticed that there were no Zenith Reds on the assembly line, and he wondered if the reds would not be in the early production queue. As that was my color choice, I called my Delivery Advisor to ask. She told me that choosing red did not affect place in queue.
Frankly, as production actually began a week after the call in which I was told 2-4 months, I don't know how much of what I'm told is reliable. From the reservation tracker on the other Lucid forum, it looks as if Zenith Red is the second most-chosen color behind Quantum Gray, constituting 20% of the reported choices. Although these are almost uselessly tiny samples, that would suggest that the absence of Zenith Red in the first twelve deliveries means that Zenith Red bodies were not available for the early part of the production queue. (Remember that Zenith Red was added to the Dream Edition choices at the last minute because so many Dream customers were asking for it.)
