Lucid Air Owner Gives His Car A Rave Review Despite A Steering Malfunction That Caused It To Be Towed

Real estate broker and YouTuber Meet Kevin filmed this video review of his Zenith red Lucid Air Dream Edition during his first week with the car. It's an overwhelmingly positive examination of the first offering from Lucid Motors, but before the video gets into the Air's features we see an added part with Kevin discussing the issues he experienced after the video was filmed.

Towed Away For Checks
In the video's prefix Kevin tells us that the issue became apparent as his father-in-law was pulling the car out of the garage at low speed. The Air's Glass Cockpit and Pilot Panel screens lit up with warning indicators and a message that the steering had failed. The steering became heavy to the point that it was almost impossible to turn the wheel. To identify the problem, which sounds like something to do with the power steering, Lucid picked up the car and took it to the Torrance, California Service Center for examination. Kevin says that it's been confirmed that whatever fault was affecting his car is not related to the recent recall for potentially-faulty dampers.

Rave Review Regardless
While obviously not thrilled at something like this happening to his new car, it's clear that Kevin is over the moon with the Lucid. Like most people he opted for Performance over Range, and chose the Zenith red paint which looks spectacular in the sunshine. He says that Air feels like a more upmarket product, comparing it to a BMW or Mercedes, and says that the car feels like it's designed for a slightly older customer than Tesla, with more of a focus on build quality and luxury. Yes, you pay quite a bit more for the Lucid, but Kevin feels that you get your money's worth, especially when he mentions the trim starting to peel in his couple-of-month-old Model S Plaid.

DreamDrive Pro(blems)
One of the less-than-stellar aspects of Kevin's Air is the lack of DreamDrive Pro functionality, especially the adaptive cruise control. He tells us the video was made during his first week of ownership, and that he received his Air in the third week of January, so that issue will have been remedied by now thanks to OTA update 1.1.5.

Another area in need of a fix is the DreamDrive Pro parallel parking system, which Kevin attempts to test in the course of the review. On the first and second tries the Air attempts to reverse itself into the chosen space as if it's a driveway, rather than a parallel parking space. The third attempt sees the same thing happen, with Kevin hitting the brakes before the Air backs itself over the curb. The image on the Pilot Panel shows that the Air seems to think it's only halfway into the parking space. Perhaps Lucid hasn't updated DreamDrive Pro with parallel parking abilities yet, as all the videos I've seen with automatic parking feature perpendicular spaces and a search for autonomous parallel parking footage comes up dry.

End On A High Note
Even with its parking foibles, it's clear that Kevin is really happy with the product that Lucid have delivered, repeatedly praising the attention to detail lavished on it and referring to the car as "a work of art" in terms of hardware. Once the software catches up, and it will, Lucid will be an even more attractive proposition in the luxury electric market. It just has to get past these teething problems first.

Images and video by Meet Kevin licensed by CC BY 2.0.

James Walker is an automotive journalist at Torque News focusing on Lucid Motors. If it's got wheels he's interested, and he's looking forward to seeing what kind of cars the EV revolution brings us. Whether it's fast, slow, new, or old, James wants to have a look around it and share it in print and on video, ideally with some twisty roads involved. You can connect with James on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.