It’s a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation for Lucid. Rivian springs higher prices on existing reservations, and everyone (rightly) throws a fit. Lucid wisely says new prices will only effect new reservations, and immediately people downgrade their preorders, set up extra preorders, and do all sorts of things to try to ensure they keep the old pricing, no matter what they decide later. Fair enough. I’ve done my share of gaming the system in my time.
But just how much of this should Lucid be expected to keep track of?
I agree the communication has been a mess. They should have drawn a line in the sand with existing reservations. We will honor what you reserved. Period. If that’s a Pure, then you get a Pure. And so on.
All this “who gets to upgrade at what price” stuff was bound to happen as soon as they weren’t clear about that.
As far as I can tell, they seem to be setting up drop dead dates for upgrades on existing reservations at the old price. June 30th was the drop dead for upgrading to GT. Why they only told Touring customers that via email is anyone’s guess. Maybe they assumed most Pure reservations weren’t interested in an upgrade of over $50k? They didn’t know (or want to accommodate) people who were interested in GT but decided to reserve a Pure in hopes of delaying their purchase?
That is a sort of odd ball use case, from Lucid’s perspective.
At some point, Lucid needs to be able to predict how much profit comes in from each GT sale. They can’t have all these cheaper reservations to honor indefinitely hanging over their books.
My guess is an email will go out later this year to Pure reservers, offering to upgrade to Touring at the original price, with a cutoff date, just like the GT had. And then that will be it.
The price increases happened for a reason. They can’t afford to sell at their original prices. They also can’t afford to piss off their early adopters. I don’t envy Lucid here, trying to navigate this.
The best thing they could do right now is decide on a final upgrade policy, and communicate it down to the DAs and SAs immediately. If that policy pisses some people off, so be it.