It hasn’t been a banner year for vehicle inspections, be it returns for rentals or leases. A group of Lucid Air lessees on an owners forum says that the EV startup has been nickel-and-diming them for insignificant dings and scuffs that don’t even meet the automaker’s own standards for excessive wear and tear. Some have been hit with exorbitant charges in response. And although Lucid says it is attending to the issue, the frustrations are still mounting for these customers.
In early June, one Air lessee began a thread on the Lucid Owners forum, sharing his account of being invoiced for $1,825 following a lease return due to alleged damages. Of that total, $1,450 was for the windshield alone, with the automaker’s inspection partner, AutoVIN, noting three tiny chips—arguably well within the realm of normal wear. The inspector also spotted something wrong with one of the sun visors, though nobody on the forum seems to be able to figure out what it was from looking at the pictures. These blemishes reportedly weren’t made known to the customer when he turned in the car, and he had full glass coverage through his insurance company; unfortunately, he wasn’t given the opportunity to make use of it.
This lessee also received his invoice through the mail multiple times, with encouragement to pay online or over the phone. He noted that the online option didn’t work, because his account was terminated after he returned the car, and the phone number listed went to a collections agency. Almost two months later, he says he still hasn’t received the call back from Lucid Financial Services that he was promised.
From then on, the other cases follow a similar tone. A particularly egregious one involved charges amounting to $5,800 issued well after the car was handed back. This customer wasn’t even given an explanation of what he was billed for initially, making it even more infuriating, especially since he reported that the Lucid employee who accepted his Air called it “one of the cleanest lease returns she’d seen.” The customer also decided not to request a pre-return inspection because, compared against Lucid’s public guidelines, nothing about the state of his sedan seemed to meet the grounds for billable damage. (Even if it had, Lucid covers its backside here by saying that AutoVIN’s pre-inspections are “a helpful tool” but have no bearing on the findings of a final inspection.)
Weeks later—after this customer was finally informed why he was billed—he shared photos with the forum. We can see a mark seemingly the size of a ballpoint pen tip, identified as “dirt in paint,” on the driver’s side passenger door. That one apparently necessitated a $585 charge. Missing plastic on the front fender’s inner liner added $1,200, and worn-away rubber on the center console’s smartphone holder was another $200, just to name a few.
The problem is, when you take a look at Lucid’s criteria for these things, it’s either excruciatingly vague or very specific, but the damage in question doesn’t fit. Take the “dirt in paint” charge, for example. Lucid does say that “debris or defects of any type” on the body constitute a bill, but only for “repainted areas.” Otherwise, the body has to have at least 11 chips before they start ringing you up, and if it’s a scuff, it’s got to be “larger than the size of a credit card.”
As for the cabin, Lucid says it’s liable to charge for “any tears, cuts, holes, or burns to the interior, regardless of size,” which gives inspectors astonishing leeway. It’s pretty much impossible to physically interact with anything and not leave some kind of microabrasion that another person could point out with a magnifying glass, if they were so determined. All the piano black trim in my car would back that up.
The Drive reached out to Lucid about these reports after a lease customer and forum member alerted us to the trend. Lucid responded with the following statement: “We are aware of some instances where our lease turn-in standards have not been interpreted consistently. We are collaborating with our banking partner to resolve disputes and sincerely apologize to those who have been inconvenienced.”
We sought to know what steps Lucid is taking to resolve these systemic breakdowns or align the criteria it enforces with those of its published guidelines, but the company wasn’t willing to speak to that. Still, the mention of the automaker’s “banking partner” is important, because while leases are handled by a department called Lucid Financial Services, that’s effectively a trade name for Bank of America. Lucid licenses its brand to Bank of America, which handles all the servicing.
Couple that with the fact that BoA is a massive organization with many different departments unto itself, and that Lucid is also working with an external partner for inspections, and you can understand how quickly this becomes a telephone maze when something goes wrong. One customer told us that they “know that people have been bounced around between Lucid, LFS (owned by BoA), BoA’s collection agency, and BoA itself” through all this, and that “it doesn’t look like [the employees] even know internally who to contact.”
Amidst all this, there’s at least a single case of a lease customer getting some relief. One member of the owners’ forum said that after about two weeks of radio silence on their appeal, they sent one last email copying multiple Lucid executives. A short while later, Lucid Financial agreed to waive a $200 charge for a 1.5-inch scuff on the edge of a wheel. (Note that Lucid’s literature says that surface damage on wheels shouldn’t be considered excessive and, thus, chargeable unless it’s longer than 3.5 inches.)
In this final response, the employee stated that Lucid had “decided to waive the charges that are in question,” and that it “[hopes] that this goodwill will encourage [them] to continue to be a customer.”
This individual, while thankful to be spared the fee, was ultimately disappointed that the employee interpreted the proper thing to do as an act of “goodwill,” and an opportunity for the company to pat itself on the back. He’s already in the middle of another Air lease, but he says it’ll be his last. Lucid’s public statement might own up to inconsistency, but we’ll have to wait for further reports on the ground to know if the automaker is truly prepared to take responsibility for these incidents.
www.thedrive.com
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