Jason Fenske of Engineering Explained put his hard-earned YouTube money where his mouth is when he leased a 2025 Lucid Air Touring. He’s a fan of EVs and liked what Lucid offered enough to get one of his own. However, he has since suffered a series of unfortunate events with the car — bad enough for Lucid to buy it back from him.
Fenske tells the whole story in this video. As an engineer, he’s made videos explaining everything from why Ducati’s V4 engine sounds so good to why new oil is better than old oil in meticulous detail, and he gives the story of his Air the same detailed treatment. At first, he was quite happy with the Air, calling it “The Engineer’s Dream Car.” We were similarly enthusiastic about the Grand Touring model we reviewed. Six months and 3,400 miles later, though, he posted a video about a number of hardware failures and software glitches he’d experienced with the car, calling the experience “very disappointing.”
Lucid responded and took Fenske’s concerns seriously. Issues like not being able to go into drive, speakers not working properly, and the Lucid app using massive amounts of cellphone battery to run in the background are all pretty frustrating for such a high-dollar vehicle. The company told him how they were correcting these issues and working on a major update. Fenske appreciated Lucid’s response and was satisfied to let the updates run their course. But while some issues were fixed, other significant new ones appeared.
The breaking point
Fenske reached the breaking point with this car after a 400-mile-long weekend trip where many features, both software and hardware, malfunctioned or didn’t work at all. The video goes much further into detail, but to summarize: The car’s rear door handles stopped working, the rear climate control provided hot air when the temperature was set to cold, the reversing lines on his backup camera disappeared, Apple CarPlay failed, then wouldn’t load at all. Music in the Lucid would spontaneously stop playing until Fenske pressed the play button on the center screen, or the car would sometimes display the wrong speed limit for the area it was in. To be fair, that last issue happens to me in Google Maps quite regularly, and may be the fault of bad third-party data, not Lucid, but it was part of an already-long list of issues.
All those issues were, no doubt, annoying, but the next issue was a safety problem. Lucid provides two stop modes in the drive settings. One allows the car to roll when your foot is off the brake, while the other will hold the car at a stop without the brake pedal until the accelerator is pressed. Fenske uses the Hold setting exclusively. When trying to back out of a parking space, the car unexpectedly began rolling forward, downhill. After freaking out (even engineers are allowed to have feelings), he figured out that the car had spontaneously changed the stop mode from Hold to Roll all by itself. This completely changed the behavior he was used to after 7,000 miles using Hold, and could have caused him to roll into something or someone, in front of him. Other minor settings, such as his battery life indicator changing from miles to percent, had changed themselves in the past, but none were critical functions like this one.
The buyback
Finally, Fenske decided enough was enough. He contacted Lucid and asked if there was any way he could get out of his three-year lease, because his car’s continuing issues were unacceptable. To its credit, Lucid agreed with him and wanted to make things right. Lucid offered to take back the Air, provide a replacement, and give him a long-term loan on a Gravity SUV while looking for it. One could say this was a sweetheart deal because he’s a YouTuber with 4.2 million subscribers, but it could also be true that Lucid was simply trying to do the right thing. Either way, Fenske was happy to accept the offer.
Unfortunately, even that didn’t work out. Because Lucid processed this as a Lemon Law situation, it was legally obligated to provide Fenske with an exact replacement for his previous car. Lucid offers so many options in its cars (over 4,600 unique combinations, by Fenske’s estimation) that finding an exact match would be impossible.
The other option was to buy back the car, refund all of his payments to date, and start a new lease for a new car. However, because the price of new cars keeps skyrocketing, his new payments would go way up — from about $865 to $1,130 a month for the same car. For a car he hasn’t had a great experience with, it just didn’t make sense, so he took the buyback.
Lucid still loaned him their big SUV, the Gravity, but it, too, suffered several electronic glitches, including a passenger window that absolutely refused to roll up. Lucid took the Gravity back, and Fenske is unsure as to whether he’ll go forward with the loan. If he says no to the Gravity coming back, he’s turning down a free car. Both Fenske and Lucid seem to have handled the situation quite fairly, but the end result is no Lucid in Fenske’s garage, and a pretty big reliability stain for Lucid.
