Owner Reports $1,300 Bill After Missed Updates On Lucid Air

The Lucid Air is a luxurious EV that has the potential to dominate the market, but one person who bought a pre-owned Air has a warning: Make sure your car is up-to-date before you buy it and then keep it updated. If you don’t, then you could be in for some very expensive repairs.

The owner said that because the car he bought had missed one update before he even owned it, it could never be updated again. Not unless he wanted to spend $1,300 on a new Telematics Control Module from a Lucid service center to help solve the problem.

Low Miles Didn’t Mean No Problems

User rking0122 first reported the problem with their pre-owned 2023 Air to an unofficial Lucid Owners forum group on October 31. They reported that they bought the car with 1,200 miles and said that it was behind on updates and they weren’t able to install them over the air. Updates are commonplace these days and can do everything from improving features to adding entirely new ones.

This owner was directed to bring their Lucid Air to a service center to receive the missing updates, and that’s when the trouble started. “Got a call today that the telematics module in the car is not communicating with the server, and they cannot repair/flash/update it even at the service center, it has to be replaced. It is also not a warranty item, it is roughly $1400,” read the post. The user then asked if anyone else had faced the same problem.

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It didn’t seem a surprise to the group that the car needed to go to the dealer for the update, but it was a surprise that the customer was being asked to pay $594.87 plus $700 in labor for the repair. A page from the Lucid warranty document helped shed some light on the matter.

Missing Updates More Than 30 Days Voids Warranty Says Lucid Document

According to Lucid’s New Vehicle Limited Warranty document, certain actions by the owner can cause the warranty to be voided. Some of those are typical, including draining the battery to zero, leaving the car for weeks on end, and making modifications to systems or the battery. But there is one surprise under the heading “What will cause the warranty to be voided?”

“Failing to install required software updates within 30 days after notification that an update is available” is one of the five items listed in that section. Because the prior owner of the car had missed some updates, the new buyer of the car was on their own.

Some users suggested that the buyer was to blame for not checking whether the car was up-to-date, but there the situation becomes even stranger. The poster showed an image from the infotainment system of the Air showing an old software version, 2.0.158, but accompanied by a note on-screen that said the vehicle was up-to-date. It appears that once the window has passed, the car no longer knows there are new updates.

Other forum users indicated that one update, to version 2.1.43 which came out in November 2023, warned users that failure to install it would lead to losing the ability to update. It’s not clear exactly what changed, but users suggest it changed the servers where the cars looked for updates. However, since this owner didn’t have their car yet, they would have no way to know this information. With the 2023 model year car having just 1,200 miles on the odometer, it’s possible the original owner also didn’t see the alert.

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There are multiple posts on the forum reporting similar issues with no longer being able to receive OTA updates. The difference in those cases is that the cars were owned by their original owners and Lucid replaced the TCM at no charge. Several users expressed concern about the 30-day rule, noting that their cars had sat at body shops and even Lucid repair centers for longer periods of time. Lucid sales have been strong this year and there’s lots of excitement around the upcoming Gravity, but this is the kind of thing that can make people regret their purchase.

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We reached out to Lucid on November 6 to ask about these issues, the focal point of which appears to be the 2.1.43 update. At the time of publication, Lucid had not replied with a statement or information. We will update this story if more information becomes available.