I had not posted earlier about this because I was getting mixed opinions on the Lucid paint job on our Dream Edition. The person who Opti-Coated the car shortly after delivery thought the paint job was pretty good and required virtually no correction. He lightly polished the car to create the surface necessary for ceramic application, and the car is still looking good nine months and 11,000 miles later. A couple of weeks back it got a pronounced parking lot ding in the middle of a rear door. The paint was not broken, and a "dent doctor" removed the dent with no sign it had ever been there.
However, a couple of months ago a detailer put a paint gauge on the car and was surprised at how thin the paint was in some spots. He thought the paint on the hood was within normal range but found the paint on the doors abnormally thin. (This included the depth of the ceramic coating, and we have the Zenith Red which also has an extra clear coat layer over the tinted clear coat exclusive to that color.) I don't remember the numbers, but overall he was very underwhelmed by the paint job.
Then today Kyle Conner posted a video of a Lucid Air Grand Touring that had been taken to a shop for paint correction, film application, and coating. They put a paint gauge on the car and found the paint so thin in places that they are afraid to do any paint correction or polishing ahead of film application. They found the paint on the hood, in particular, to be almost "nonexistent".
Although the locations of unacceptably thin paint varied between this car and our car, the conclusion was the same as my detailer reached: the paint application is erratic, troublingly thin in some places, and never better than minimally acceptable in others.
What gives after all those videos of Lucid's supposedly state-of-the-art paint line? Conner even speculated that the paint is having to be polished too heavily in order to get an acceptable-looking finish after the cars come out of the paint shop.
