That email was meant for Airs, I spoke to the studio and they barely have a single Gravity for looking. At the time of my call they didn’t even know why they suddenly were getting calls for test drives, nobody gave them a heads up.
This has has been the situation at Lucid for a very long time. The Sales and the Marketing operations are managed separately, and they do not communicate with each other. I do not know why, but it's one of the weirdest persistent organizational issues I've ever seen, especially in a fairly small company.
I have seen the scenario you describe play out in other contexts. The most pronounced was at the West Palm Beach Studio last fall. I got an email nvitation to attend a "special" showing of a Gravity during a 2-hour window. We rearranged a league tennis match to make the visit within the specified hours. We arrived at the showroom right at the start of the specified viewing window. I walked up to a sales associate and said I had an invitation for the "special" event. She seemed confused, saying the car had been on the floor since the afternoon of the day before, and anyone could walk in off the street and see it. A few minutes later, a couple of people from Lucid Marketing marched out of a backroom with several trays of sandwiches and snacks for the "special" showing. I asked the sales associate what was going on, and she just shrugged, saying she had no idea.
A similar situation played out a few weeks later when a different Gravity arrived at the Miami Worldcenter Studio for another "special" showing to which I received an invitation. This time I called ahead and was told the car was already in the showroom, and there were no designated "special" viewing hours. This studio was more heavily staffed with sales associates than West Palm Beach, and there was a large contingent of corporate Marketing and corporate Product Planning people on hand. I had a long and very informative talk with one of the Product Planning staffers. But when I later asked a couple of sales associates questions, I found them woefully ill-informed. One didn't even realize that a wall display had been put up that displayed Gravity interior colors and that the exterior color blocks had been set up for viewing on a table. It was clear that the sales associates had been kept completely out of the loop of how the marketing people were managing the showing as well as not being briefed on the Gravity itself.
I have wondered whether allowing this type of organizational disarray to fester might not have played a role in Peter Rawlinson's departure, especially as Winterhoff seemed to go out of his way during the earnings call to mention marketing shortcomings as something that was going to be addressed.
In fairness, Rawlinson had too much on his plate for any mortal, and this seemed to be exacerbated by his engineer's bias to obsess over engineering details. It is also why every car he has developed, beginning with the original Model S, has broken major new ground. So I'm glad he was there, and I'm one who wished he had stayed.
But his successors need to get on the stick and finally get Marketing and Sales on the same page.
