I think your view of that call is too cynical by half. Yes, it was a wise move. But I've spent enough years around corporate marketing efforts to know this call was not that.
Dlala was more candid on the call than my post about it might have conveyed. He spent zero time trying to make excuses. He told me that Lucid made a mistake in not putting more early-on focus on UI software. He told me that quality assurance procedures had been sorely lacking. He told me about issues they were seeing with some cars that I had not ever heard about. He confessed that there were problems with the HUD system that go beyond software, to the point that he has turned the system off in his own car. He told me that there were times he would drive the car but would not turn it over to his wife because of some of the problems we on the forum have experienced.
Throughout the rest of the day after the call, he texted me several times asking for more specifics and any photos, videos, or other information I could give him to help him run down issues. He texted me several times with follow-up questions. He has asked me to try to get a recording of one of the problems unique to our Lucids so his team could understand it better as they have never encountered it. (This relates to the fact that when any two of our Lucids are on the road at the same time, both lose the ability to play music without interruption even though they're playing from different sources. He said they were aware that two Lucids in the same household would experience the problem if they were both streaming from the same source, such as Tidal or Spotify. But they had never seen our problem where the cars are streaming from separate sources -- even from a USB stick.)
This was not a man who made a slick marketing call and then ascended back into the clouds. I have talked to a couple of people who know Dlala personally, and the man I heard on the call yesterday was the earnest, candid, and knowledgeable man they have described to me.
