Lucid Air Grand Touring Performance Yearlong Review: The Mobile Service Experience

The Lucid Air’s service schedule only calls for an annual maintenance appointment, but six months into our year-long stewardship of a $180,650 Grand Touring Performance model, we had to call for a technician to help with a small but annoying problem. When we switched our car from 19-inch winter tires and wheels to the 21-inch summer setup, the car stopped communicating with the tire pressure monitoring sensors. The Air, we soon learned, can only pair with and remember a single set of sensors, and there’s no way for an owner or a third-party shop to reprogram the car for new sensors. Lucid drivers who run a second set of wheels in winter will either need to arrange semi-annual service visits or live with a persistent tire-pressure warning light for half the year.

At least a Lucid service visit is less inconvenient than the typical oil change. Like Rivian and Tesla, Lucid employs a team of roving technicians who perform maintenance and make minor repairs in a customer’s driveway or office parking lot.

Making an appointment starts with a call to the Lucid customer service line, but you ultimately need to talk to a local service rep to get a date on the calendar. The first time I called, the call center couldn’t get through to the Coldwater, Michigan, service center, which kicked off a game of phone tag that lasted a couple weeks. The drawn-out timeline was largely my fault, but it would have been nice if I had been able to schedule the visit within minutes of making the original call. Scheduling the appointment online would have been even better—at least in the eyes of this millennial—but Lucid doesn’t offer that option.

On the day of the appointment, the Lucid technician, Mike, called ahead to give me an ETA and arrived promptly. Mike normally travels Ohio in his Mercedes-Benz Sprinter mobile workshop, but he was working out of the Michigan service center for the week and had made the 90-minute drive from Coldwater that morning.

I’d already installed the 21-inch wheels and Pirelli P Zero (PZ4) tires in the MotorTrend garage a couple weeks earlier, so addressing the TPMS issue was a matter of reconfiguring the software and taking the car for a test drive to ensure everything worked. Easy.

Mike also addressed a couple quality issues that had cropped up in recent weeks. A section of weatherstripping around the driver-side rear door had come loose and no matter how many times I pressed it back into place, it always ended up flapping in the wind within a day or so. A closer look revealed that the adhesive that was supposed to hold it in place had collected so much road crud, it was no longer sticky. Mike replaced the entire piece of weatherstripping.

The knob used to adjust and close the passenger-side rear climate vent had fallen out while I was wiping down the interior. At the time, I spent 30 minutes trying to line everything up to snap it back into place with no luck. Mike didn’t even bother trying. He replaced the entire climate vent assembly and packaged up the original so it could be shipped back to engineering for analysis.

With my requests taken care of, Mike performed an inspection for a Lucid technical service campaign, TSC-M02223-001-01. He jacked up the front left corner of the car and slipped a borescope between the fender and the wheelwell liner to look at a coolant hose, a bracket, and a strap tying the two together. If the hose is installed improperly, it can lead to a leak, and Mike was prepared to replace parts if needed. That proved unnecessary. Our car checked out OK.

At every service visit, Lucid preemptively replaces the key fob battery for free. Unfortunately, that didn’t do anything to improve the key’s dismal range. You generally have to be standing within 30 feet of the car for it to recognize button presses to unlock the doors or pop the trunk.

Finally, Mike offered a pair of matte black bear decals inspired by the California flag for our car’s front fenders. A younger, more serious version of me would have immediately declined. Stickers? On this six-figure luxury car? Surely you can’t be serious. But if having kids has taught me anything, it’s that you never say no to stickers. Stickers turn tiny people into tiny potty-trained people. They make dentist visits not just tolerable but fun. They are magical little tickets to a better day.  So, yes, MotorTrend‘s Lucid Air Grand Touring Performance now wears a pair of bears on the front fenders.

The work cost us nothing, although it’s worth noting that a service call to only reprogram the tire pressure sensors could have been expensive. The invoice noted $600 for the three hours of travel time from Coldwater to Ann Arbor and back, but that cost was waived due to the warranty work performed.

Most owners of a $180,650 luxury electric sedan—people with far more money than time—wouldn’t think twice about spending that amount. With no shuttling between the service center and my house and no time wasted in a waiting room, I was able to work in my home office as I normally would for the entirety of the four-hour visit. It’s hard to overstate the convenience of having your car serviced in your driveway. That’s one way Lucid and other EV startups are changing the industry beyond the cars they build.