Yesterday I test drove a Grand Touring model at the West Palm Beach location. Having followed this forum for a few months, I am well aware of the general sentiment of the car thus far – the hardware is great, and the software needs work. I went into the one-hour test drive with a bias of excitement and optimism but left feeling cautious. Very cautious. Here are some notes from my experience::
- I believe this is the only Grand Touring available to demo East of the Mississippi
- The Lucid staff who accompanied me was super-nice, and she had a notepad where she was capturing the issues because everything was “pre-production” (I heard that term about 15 times during the drive). By the end of the ride, she probably had a page of notes.
- Once I got into the car, I was told the navigation, radio, and Alexa wasn’t working
- Whenever the car came to a stop, it regularly made a loud clunking sound when I reengaged the car, which was probably the brake releasing.
- I had a heart-pounding moment making a left turn on a busy road with the car abruptly stopping on its own in the middle of oncoming traffic with the electronics freezing for a second. This was a VERY serious safety issue and frankly shattered my confidence in the tech. I had a total loss of control of the vehicle for a few seconds and I’m feeling blessed nothing catastrophic happened to either of us. The Lucid staff said it was probably related to the line markings on the road and the camera.
- When we returned to the showroom after the drive, they were going to demo the Dolby Atmos audio from a car that has the most updated software. Unfortunately, they couldn’t get the car to connect to the internet, so that didn’t work.