The letter from Lucid arrived eleven months after the car. It said the company wanted the owner's experience to be excellent, acknowledged it was not, and outlined an offer intended to provide, at minimum, what the owner might be entitled to under lemon law. By that point, the reviewer at Engineering Explained had documented eight distinct software failures across a single four-day weekend trip in a Lucid Air Touring, on top of months of ongoing problems since taking delivery. The car stickered for around $85,000 and had accumulated 7,000 miles. Lucid agreed to buy it back in full, repaying every lease payment made, and provided a Lucid Gravity Touring as a long-term loaner. The Air itself drove beautifully every time it cooperated. The software was a different story.
Lucid is one of the few EV startups to achieve meaningful production, and the Air has genuinely earned its reputation for efficiency and range. But software reliability in long-term ownership has been a recurring concern across multiple reviewers, not just this one. The problems documented here go beyond nuisance: rear doors that would not open on an unlocked car, rear climate zones blowing air ten degrees Celsius apart despite being set identically, Apple CarPlay failing to load and then failing to stay loaded, a reverse camera that stopped displaying guidance lines, a speed limit display showing 75 mph in a 45 mph zone, and music that paused at random and required manual restart every time. Any one of these would be a minor irritant in isolation. Eight over four days, in an $85,000 vehicle, adds up to something that feels less like owning a car and more like managing a system that doesn't quite work.
The most serious incident happened in a ski resort parking lot. The reviewer had used one-pedal driving for the entire 7,000-mile ownership period, with the stop mode set to hold. While the car sat parked and unoccupied, it switched itself from hold to roll. When the reviewer put the car in reverse and released the brake, it rolled forward. It took three attempts to get it moving correctly. On a steep San Francisco hill, that specific failure could cause a collision. Separately, the Lucid companion app consumed 46 percent of an iPhone 17's battery in one day, almost entirely in background activity, while a GPS fitness tracking app running continuously for five hours that same day used 7 percent. Replacing the car with an identical-spec Air proved impossible because Lucid's configuration options produce enough build variants that an exact match effectively does not exist at low volume, which prompted the full buyback instead.
Bottom line: Lucid's response here was genuinely good. They acknowledged the problem without equivocation and acted quickly. But a sympathetic buyback for one reviewer does not fix the underlying issue for the broader ownership base. Software problems at this level tend to be fleet-wide, not isolated to one unlucky car, and a stop-mode setting that changes itself while a vehicle is parked is not a quirk. Until Lucid demonstrates consistent software reliability across its lineup, buying an Air requires a higher tolerance for unpredictability than most $85,000 car buyers should need to carry. The Gravity loaner may tell a better story. Watch for that review.