Lucid is an extremely confounding company. It makes, arguably, some of the best electric cars in the world. They are remarkably efficient and cleverly packaged. The company, though, is allergic to success and constantly fumbles the ball in the red zone. Now it’s delaying its much-needed midsize crossover. This is bad news and, at the same time, good news.
The Morning Dump will not be full of riddles and contradictions today, as the universe mostly makes sense. Subaru has three new or redesigned electric crossovers, courtesy of Toyota, and it’s costing about $9,000 per vehicle to move them off the lots. Honda, by getting rid of electric cars and by virtue of being a Japanese company, is reporting an increase in profits.
General Motors was one of the first automakers to make headway in China via its joint-venture with SAIC, and it sounds like that’ll continue for at least another 20 years.
Lucid CEO Says ‘We’re Not Going To Make The Mistake Of The Past’
Above is a photo of a Lucid Cosmos winter testing. I saw this vehicle, uncovered, earlier this year and was told it would debut before the end of the year. The camo sells the vehicle a little short as I think it’s an overall attractive shape. Also, ain’t no one seeing this car this year.
And no one, including the company’s new CEO Silvio Napoli, can even tell you when it’s exactly going to appear. Here’s what Napoli told CNBC:
“We’re not going to make the mistake of the past where products, great cars, were in fact tainted by launching before things were ready,” he said. “I think it’s going to be ’27. … Most likely the second half of ’27.”
That’s a long time. We’re in the second half of 2026 according to my abacus, which means that this car isn’t seeing the light of day for a while. This is a tough call, especially as the company reported an even bigger loss than expected ($3.30 per share versus the expected $2.46) last quarter. Selling a midsize EV is something that’s absolutely necessary if it wants to continue to exist alongside Cadillac, Tesla, and Rivian.
Also, yeah, this is the right call. Lucid is in the middle of what it calls an “operational reset” right now, and for good reason. The decision-making at the company has been extremely engineering-first, which is generally good, but something keeps getting lost in between engineering a great car and building something that works and people will buy.
For instance, the original Lucid Air looks great (in my view) and performs better than basically any other large electric car you can buy today in the United States from an efficiency standpoint. I drove one a great distance and was impressed with its performance and also flummoxed by all of its annoying flaws. The new Lucid Gravity also performs extremely well and it still has some major problems. For all its range, I think it would have been worth trading a little aero for something that looks a little less like a minivan (or more like a minivan, honestly). And then there’s the scary recall over improperly-welded seats.
Some of this is a double-standard as Tesla and Xiaomi have released cars that suffered from early recalls and delays. The difference is that those companies both have long track records of producing successful products.
“Lucid has leading technology, compelling products and deeply committed people, but potential is not performance,” said Napoli. “We are going back to basics, with a clear focus on cash, customers, and culture. We are focused on delivering on our four must win priorities, including our $1.4 billion cash flow improvement plan and the advancement of our Robotaxi, AMP-2, and Midsize programs, which will establish a strong foundation for Lucid’s next chapter.”
In addition to those four “must win priorities” (savings, robotaxi, AMP-2, midsize) the company also has three priorities? There’s so much leadership-speak gibberish it’s a little hard to keep track, but the other three priorities are: Cash and Cost, Customer and Quality, and Culture and Team.
And the eighth, unspoken priority, is to have fewer priorities going forward.
It Takes Subaru $9,000 In Spiffs To Move A Single New Electric Car
There are so many new Toyota-based Subaru EVs it’s almost hard to keep track of them all. There’s the Solterra, which is a Toyota bZ; there’s the Trailseeker, which is a bZ Woodland; the Getaway is a Highlander EV; and the Uncharted is a C-HR. Is that right? I’m like 87% sure that’s correct.
Given that Subaru was not exactly lighting up the world when it was selling a single EV, the logic of selling a bunch of seemingly overlapping crossovers is lost on me. It’s also lost on consumers, as Automotive News is reporting that it’s costing a lot of money to move these vehicles:
Subaru introduced two EVs in the U.S. in the period, adding the Uncharted and Trailseeker to the Solterra, on sale since 2022. Average spending on those increased to $9,155 for the Uncharted, $8,982 on the Trailseeker and $9,650 for the Solterra, according to Motor Intelligence.
Outback spiffs were just $3,036.
Subaru’s overall incentive level totaled below the industry average of $3,479 in April-June, but its 40 percent spending surge from the year before outpaced the wider market’s 4.4 percent rise.
Subaru reported a 44% drop in operating profit last quarter, and a lot of that is attributed to EV incentives (or spiffs). That’s not ideal.
Yen And The Art Of Motorcycle Profits
Honda has been a bit of a wobbly proposition lately as it recovers from an overinvestment in likely dead-end electric car projects. At the same time, Honda has a bunch of profitable hybrids and bikes, and it makes cars in Japan.
Quarterly profit reached a record thanks to Honda’s motorcycle business, which accounted for about ¥234 billion of the ¥531 billion for the period that ended in June. Analysts had been expecting ¥300 billion for the quarter. Meanwhile, its automobile business saw steady sales in North America but lost ground in China. Net sales rose 14% to ¥6.1 trillion.
“Honda’s efforts to improve its auto cost structure had already been bearing fruit, but the progress was obscured by battery EV losses and parts shortages,” said Bloomberg Intelligence senior auto analyst Tatsuo Yoshida. “The underlying improvement became much clearer in the first quarter.”
The company increased its guidance for the 2027 fiscal year, partially because it initially expected a yen of about 145 to the dollar, and instead it’ll probably be 155, which helps with exports.
GM-SAIC Will Keep Working Together Through 2047
GM is killing the Chevy brand in China as it focuses on Buick, Cadillac, and exporting cars it builds cheaply there to markets that are not Europe or the United States, as The Detroit News reports:
The Detroit automaker said on Tuesday the extended 50-50 joint venture will result in more vehicle-development work being done in the world’s largest auto market to appeal to local tastes.
The terms will also allow GM to ship Buicks and Cadillacs from China to the Middle East, Africa, South America, Mexico and elsewhere in Asia, starting with the exports of the China-developed Buick Electra series later this year, GM said.
SAIC said in a separate statement that the renewed partnership would allow China’s “local innovation to be shared globally.”
The initial partnership was formed in 1997 and allowed GM to reap huge profits in the country until automakers there got on their feet and started building successful EVs and hybrids.
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
My daughter is aware, via Bill Nye the Science Guy, of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which is a funny way to know that song. I turned on an essentials playlist for her in the car yesterday, and it was a reminder of how much I liked “In Bloom.”
The Big Question
What’s the most cursed car in history? What should have been delayed?
Top photo: Lucid
Lucid really needs this to go smoother. Their history with less then production ready cars isn’t great. But that’s the ev market as a whole. KHG has been about the only one fully testing their evs. But new things are always going to come up when you run it though production and hand it over to the public.
There is this idea in software to ship not the complete product then finish it as time goes on. The added features are often planned from early on just not built. So many ev manufacturer got caught in that trap.
Chinese have gotten to the point able to standardize their interfaces and the logic is supplied by their vendors. Sometimes the whole rtos and ux ui with the logic the brand just customizes it.
Lucid doesn’t have that or even stable ground to stand on with their software. It’s not surprising lucid is delaying the did the reveal then have been quiet. Also the camo on all their prototypes now long after a reveal seems strange. It makes me think they have changed something.
Most cursed is a hard metric. So many cars known for doing terrible things. For recent car it seems like you have rouge with their constant cvt issues, then so many other power and drivetrain issues from ford and other brands. Of course the fisker saga. Hard to forget the terribleness of the Dodge hornet. But the Germans have been doing hot garbage for a while too. As older the Ralph nader cars come to mind as being cursed.
The Dodge hornet was so terrible and recent from established brands that I could see it being viewed most cursed by the most people. It’s one of the few cars I’ve seen multiple of that had recently been bought new towed back to the dealer and the dealer just taking them back.
They also could have spent more time on it and less on trying to figure out what was the absolute max MSRP they could put on it while still being wrong.
The ‘ship now, patch later’ mindset in software is infuriating. It’s everywhere now. Operating systems, video games, infotainment, cell phones, etc. all suffer from it. OTA updates and always connected systems enable it, and we’re all worse off for it existing.
The worst part about ‘ship now, patch later’ is the team almost always gets a project once the previous one is released, and there’s not nearly enough incentive to actually finish the shipped project later.
Software engineers have gotten almost as bad as MBAs in my book. I guess they have joined forces in stupidity.
I once met one that wasn’t swimming money so less excuse to be stupid. Trying to use a $3500+ Alan bradly plc to control a $3 computer fan in a maybe $800 backyard smoker. Esp8266 had been around for several years at that point along with pi zero and and other low cost sbc with gpio. Plus tons of other sub $3 micro controllers that would have done the job. You can’t help stupid.
At least windows style hot patching isn’t really a thing done with rtos and Linux based systems.
Most cursed … Those early-mid 00 Jeeps and Range Rovers that had electrical failures before they got out of the factory bay, and had problems every time they were started.
Most cursed car in history? Christine, the 1958 Plymouth.
I reality, likely the Edsel.
The CyberTurd is out-Edsel’ing the Edsel.
Yeah… you may be right.
“Honda … recovers from an overinvestment in likely dead-end electric car projects.”
Seems to me the investment wasn’t the problem – folding with what could have been a winning hand was.
The smarter move would have been to merely rejigger the styling to be more conservative – not throw the entire project out right before Oil hit $100/barrel again.
It really is the back and forth short term decision making that’s killing automakers. I get they’re beholden to quarterly performance by shareholders but still…
Automakers who have followed an “all of the above” strategy, with significant investment in EVs all while retaining traditional combustion models are reaping the benefits right now. BMW is the perfect example.
The Honda SuperCub is still an appealing vehicle.
Since I haven’t seen a comment about it, can we just claim every Stellantis hybrid (including the FCA Pacifica) as the most cursed cars out there?
I mean, by 2030 an original engine or battery pack 4XE might be showing up in “Unappricated Survivor” social media groups as one of the very few “lucky ones” to still, ya know, be driving.
Ouch. What a burn.
Hell, as a Mopar guy, even I have to admit those things are JUNK.
Can we stop saying Lucid is great at engineering? Not having software defects is engineering. Having a good UI is engineering. Balancing aero and styling is engineering. By most accounts, they are bad at these things. Maxing out one parameter is not engineering.
A former Chrysler engineer once wrote “Engineering is the art of making intelligent compromises.” These cars remind me of the arguments that cars like the Veyron are not well engineered, because they just choose to ignore certain constraints. And even worse than that, they don’t appear to be well implemented in the absence of compromises.
I do like this argument and accept it.
THE ONLY THING WRONG WITH THE AERO AND STYLING OF THE GRAVITY IS THE LACK OF A SLIDING DOOR LIKE GOD INTENDED.
It’s a minivan. Have the stones to be a minivan, Lucid.
Do you want even fewer sales? Because that’s how you get fewer sales.
A sliding door would be a death kneel for the already imperiled Gravity.
Spot on.
Or to put it another way – any bloody idiot with unlimited funds can make a really, really fast, horribly compromised car. It takes an absolute genius to make a decent affordable car. Not many geniuses around these days.
Took the words out of my mouth. In engineering, optimizing the trade space for what your customer actually needs and will buy is the true art. Min-maxing one specific parameter is virtually never the correct answer, and as you note, Lucid failed miserable in this sense. Their engineering seems to be obsessed with having the most everything- most aero profile, most power dense motors, most quickest-responding electronic door handles, but at no point have they ever bothered to ask “do we actually need this?”
1958 Chrysler 300 Electrojet, followed closely and probably more famously by the 1981 Imperial. Both were known quite well for half baked fuel injection setups. but the 81 had plenty of other quality issues.
I really, really wish Lucid could get their act together. I liked the Air from the first time I saw one, even buying stock at one point (thankfully sold before it tanked).
For all the “I bought this before I knew he was crazy” stickers I see on Teslas and people like me who will never buy a Tesla product with current leadership (and stated positions that said leader avows), there is a market for an alternative to Tesla that’s not Big 3.
If you aren’t going to buy a car due to the ethics of the leadership, I’m not sure Lucid is the best alternative. While not a direct officer of the company, Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman is the biggest stakeholder via the Saudi Public Investment Fund. At least the musky one hasn’t directly ordered the murder of a journalist (that we know of).
MBS. Mr. Bone Saw.
Matt and the EngineeringExplained guy on YouTube are suddenly a little more nervous…
Learn something new every day. Didn’t know MBS was involved with them. I guess I owned a different class of shares. 🙂
I finally saw a Gravity in person and boy is it weird. From a distance I couldn’t even tell what it was. It’s…better in person than it is in pictures but it’s still one peculiar looking car. I genuinely have no idea what they were thinking, I guess “engineering first” as our pal Matt says…but I think the Venn Diagram of people willing and able to spend nearly six figures (or more) for an electric crossover and people who like vans and van-like objects are practically separate circles.
It’s just a deeply weird product that could’ve been a throw over home plate if they played their cards right. Alas. Anyway just add the Cosmos to the growing pile of delayed EVs that might never actually happen…although Lucid has access to that sweet sweet Saudi blood money so they can afford to fuck up another time or two.
Speaking of which, I’ve been saying for months now that the new crop of Toyota (and by extension Subaru) EVs are going to be a real litmus test for where the American EV market is at. They’re competitively priced, well styled for the most part, have the right charge ports, and range that’s at least on the low end of competitive.
Plus they’re from brands that are household names. It seems as though the early results at Subaru have left a lot to be desired, but believe it or not the Trailseeker has received very positive reviews so far…and I’m already seeing them, CHRs/Uncharteds out in the wild, so someone is buying them. That being said DC has always been pretty pro EV and EV friendly so we probably shouldn’t draw too many conclusions.
I am here a lot and I somehow missed the [checks article] Uncharted and its Toyota half-sibling.
The CHR. There were a few articles about them. I do think they look good, but if you aren’t interested in commuter EVs (like most of this site if we’re being honest with ourselves) they were easy to miss. But therein lies the problem, doesn’t it?
We bought a 2026 BZ XLE+ FWD a few months ago and could not be happier.
It’s an appliance, but it’s an appliance that gets 4 mi/kWh (with lots of highway driving), is reasonably comfortable, looks decent and most importantly, my wife loves it.
If I did not WFH, I would have sold the Corvette and bought a Woodland/Trailseeker.
Toyota finally built what my granola-munching, Subaru-driving demographic has been asking for this whole time: an electric Crosstrek/Forester/Outback.
These have real ground clearance, unlike pretty much every affordable EV, and that’s a big deal; people in the mountain west really do use ground clearance as a buy/don’t-buy filter, because if you can’t haul your mountain bikes to the trailhead or get to your favorite dispersed camp site, what’s even the point? A friend traded in an Outback for a CHR this week.
Side note: Apparently Subaru wanted an extra $3k for an Uncharted in the same spec, which might explain some of their incentive spend.
My boss loves his BZ Lease so much he got on the list to get the Lexus version when his current lease is up. They’re pretty good as an appliance, but I don’t get the hype. However, that applies to my feeling for every Toyota product with the exception of the GR 86, Corolla, and Supra.
Yeh I’ve only seen one Gravity and I live in EV friendly Seattle which probably doesn’t bode well for them. I’ve always wanted to like the Air but never could fully love the distinctive looks, but the Gravity just seems like a full on swing and miss when they needed a hit.
To that point since I also live in what feels like the epicenter of Subaru’s hottest market I’m curious to see how their EVs sell here. We already know their customers don’t care about styling so the fact that it doesn’t look very Subaru shouldn’t matter, but I am genuinely curious how folks feel about the range as many people here really do get use Subarus to get to outdoorsy stuff in places where EV charging is often not readily available.
That’s my exact issue with them still in the Seattle region. I daily a Polestar, which is great around town, and I’ve taken it (and it’s limited clearance) up into the mountains, but the range and charging speeds do become a significant issue. I’ve never really had an issue with clearance/awd (choosing lines carefully allowed me to get my little Hyundai Accent out in places with Tacomas/4Runners at the trailhead, short of actual rock crawling), but range matters. Not because it’s not possible, it definitely is, but because it impacts trip timing so substantially.
Due to lack of cell service in spots and weather impacts on range, I tend to be very conservative when planning how much battery I’ll need to get from a charger, to the trailhead (often 50+ miles), and back. This typically means charging right before going up into the mountains, and right after. When I’m already planning on a tight turnaround after carrying all my gear down the trail at 7pm and I’m dead tired, the last thing I want to do is have to deal with a 25+ minute stop that can quickly balloon into 40+ minutes if a charger is down or already being used. I still depend on my friend’s gas cars for now.
Honestly, this is a totally solvable issue – WA just needs to build more fast chargers in smaller towns that can handle higher volumes (6+ chargers available). In the meantime, I’ll be waiting for a used R3x (and hoping it has 300+ miles of range, the ~240 on the Polestar just isn’t enough for this.)
This is interesting to hear-we’ve been debating replacing my wife’s car with an EV vs a Hybrid and what you’re describing has been exactly our fear with jumping into an EV. And to your point I’ve been thinking a real world 300+ range would be what we need to do most camping/hiking trips and likely be able to just do the whole thing on one go and charge when we get home-the previous owner already installed a charger at our house.
I think if you were able to swing one of the new EVs with that longer range, I’d totally go for it. Realistically part of my problem is I live in an apartment so I never get to start my trips fully charged either. The ease of never having to go to a charger/gas station with at-home charging is honestly pretty hard to pass up for all the rest of the time you’re not going into the mountains, and road trips mostly aren’t an issue for us since we can use the Tesla network in addition to the various CCS chargers, even if it’s a bit slower at times.
Of course, if you’re towing anything for camping, using a bike rack/roof rack, or otherwise messing with your aero/drag, I’d definitely go hybrid. The Polestar has good winter range, but cruising at 80-85 through Eastern WA/OR with a trunk-mounted bike rack absolutely crushes it’s range even in the summer lol, probably around 150 miles between charges realistically. Plug-in would be ideal since you’ve got at home charging, but the price hikes on them might not be worth it over a standard hybrid.
Yeh currently our ideal would be a lightly used PHEV but there just aren’t that many AWD (non-German) options outside of the rather overpriced RAV4 Prime.
That’s a bummer the bike rack kills the range so badly, when I’ve used a rooftop bike rack/ski rack/yakima box I don’t feel like I’ve lost more than 1-2 mpg typically-good to know though.
The Gravity is so much smaller in person than I was expecting, and it’s indeed quite strange. It’s nothing like other 7 seaters.
I suppose that’s Lucid’s packaging prowess, I’m sure it’s huge inside.
Cursed car. A 1992 Camry.
My best friend got his first new car soon after he got his first real job that paid real money.
On the way back from the dealership, he hit some gravel and slid off an on-ramp and rolled it down a hill. Not a lot of damage, but off it went to the body shop.
He got his car back after many weeks in the body shop on a moving day for his family. His dad forgot about the Camry being around and backe the moving truck into the Camry. So back to the shop again.
I showed up to visit a couple months later and my friend went to get the carr from the shop and was driving it home to show it off, when he was rear-ended fairly lightly. The problem was that there was a truck with a hitch in front of him and he ended up with the front bumper stuck on the hitch. As a result, the first time I saw the car, it was almost a year old, had less than 200 miles and was missing a front bumper.
A year or two later, he got married to a woman that was born in Canada, but raised in India. They completed paperwork to have her become a US citizen and then read the fine print about not be allowed to leave the country for so many months. Unfortunately all her stuff was in Canada. They drove across to Canada to get her stuff, and on the way back, the accent raised questions, which ended with the Camry sitting by Lake Erie for an entire winter with the interior outside of the car because they thought that drug smuggling might have been involved. Eventually, my friend got the car and his wife back, but it took 6 months or more.
He wasn’t a Catholic, but he fricking needed a priest to exorcise that car. I think he traded it in when it was 10 years old and still hadn’t gotten to 30k miles, because it was still getting in minor fender benders every other week it seemed.
Ironically, his dad also got a 92 Camry. I think it had 300k miles on it and no accidents when they sold it. My friend drove the hell out of that Camry when his Camry was in the shop.
Mom had a 2011 Camry. 3 separate times she got hit while pumping gas, the third totaling the car out. I tried really hard to convince her that maybe she should get an EV so she never has to go back to those cursed gas stations, but she doesn’t like new things. (she actually didn’t like how big they all were and instead got a Rio hatchback)
I had a cursed piece of plywood once. It was busy at Hechingers one Saturday over 40 years ago and I decided that it would be quicker to carry a sheet of plywood out to dad’s truck then to fart around with the cart which couldn’t fit between two trucks. As I started to step out between these two trucks, some nimrod came flying by, hit the board sent me sprawling. Fortunately, the impact just yanked the wood out of my hands and damaged the two vehicles I was walking between. When I got up, dad was arguing with 3 people on who should pay for the damage. The piece of plywood wasn’t damaged too bad and I decided to carry it to the truck while dad figured things out.
It was windy and I was a bit concussed (in retrospect) and between having a giant sail on me and being more goofy than normal, I kept finding truck lids of various cars appearing under the plywood.
One was a Mercedes Benz Convertible. When I moved away, it stayed there, I started moving quicker it stayed there. Just as I felt down and the wood slammed into the trunk lid, I realized the backup lights were on.
As I got out from under the car, a woman appeared and started screaming at me that she couldn’t see me walking behind her because there was this big piece of plywood in the way. I asked what she thought was holding the plywood and she started screaming louder and my dad and his two “Friends” from the previous plywood related incident appeared to add more voices to the chaos.
Ask any old fart (like me) and they will tell you that drivers 40+ years ago were much better than today, without cell phones and electronic nannies and the like. So, I figure it had to be that piece of plywood being cursed.
And thanks to it, I can’t walk through a parking lot with GM vehicles without about crapping myself.
Ford Focus with the PowerShift DCT…should have listened to the Engineers.
“Yen And The Art Of Motorcycle Profits”
Hard to explain why, exactly, but this hit the funny bone perfectly today.
Well done, Matt!
TBQ: The Vega is too obvious, so I’m going to go with a concept that permanently seems to be in Vaporware Hell: the flying car. The idea of an easy-to-pilot or autonomous flying machine that requires no runway or any large hangar, used for stress and traffic free personal transport, seems to have constantly captured the imagination of engineers and techbros throughout history. There’s only ever been one roadable aircraft that reached certification, – the Taylor Aerocar – and that wasn’t very big, required towing the wings and tail to the airport, and was neither a good car or airplane. And most damning of all, they never sold in significant numbers. Everything else either only existed on paper, never was able to perform to expectations, or has been stuck in Development And Certification Hell. Or some combination, usually combined with questionable marketability.
That said, pretty much any of the ’70s subcompact American cars could have used maybe a bit more time in development.
The general population can barely handle the x and y axis. We certainly don’t need to add the z axis into the mix.
How about the intersection of the two, the flying Pinto that killed it’s creator?
2nd gear: In the language of my youth in the 80s, at least locally, a “Spiff” was a small joint.
So, in my mind, I thinking, “If it takes $9000 worth of joints to convince someone to buy an EV, maybe they aren’t really ready for an EV.”
My mind also goes to how it’s hard to have range anxiety if you drive like this.
https://youtu.be/_v39JQZ_tyw?t=23
We called them spliffs. “Spiff” makes me think of Calvin and Hobbs, Calvin’s “Spaceman Spiff” alter ego.
Yeah, come to think of it, Spliff.
Interesting. in my mind, a joint is a “spliff”, while a bribe or a tip is a “spiff”.
Spiff vs spliff has been hashed, but I also had a little cognitive dissonance with the term “spiff” as it was used in tfa.
When I worked in a retail computer store in the early 1990s, “spiff” was specifically a payment the manufacturer made to the sales weasel for selling a particular item (as opposed to a commission, which was paid by the store, not the manufacturer); if the payment was made to the customer, it would be a “rebate”.
TBQ: The Vega. It looked good and they invested in the special rail cars to transport it, but it should have been delayed to work all the issues out before unleashing it on an unsuspecting public.
Runner up: The Fiero. Iron Duke, random fires are an issue for the courts, lackluster suspension, and by that point typical GM don’t give a F build quality.
Watching Jason’s odyssey with his Lucid Air on his Engineering Explained YT channel has been eye opening. In less than a year it went from excitement of buying an engineering dream to dealing with more quirks than features to outright disappointment. Lucid’s response, or attempted response, was further disappointing. Even the buyback didn’t go that well.
This Napoli guy is right about one thing, they need to go back to basics of how to actually build a product that works, how to handle customer concerns, and how to respond when they don’t.
Rich Rebuilds just did a show about rebuilding one that was wrecked, as well as another body shop guy doing the same thing. Lucid bricked both of the cars and refuses to sell them parts unless they pay $50k to “rebody” the entire vehicle. Its really insane and morally wrong. Both vehicles have extremely light damage and Lucid is awful.
It’s a shame, they’ve designed a great car but can’t handle managing the business.
Everyone knows they should’ve delayed the Pinto, I don’t think there’s a more obvious pick for that.
TBQ: Car that should’ve been delayed – Cimmaron.
Most cursed car – Edsel
How long would you need to delay a Cimmaron for it to grow into something other than a Cavalier?
Until someone could look at it and say “That’s nothing more than a rebadged Cobalt.”
Yep
I say if they had waited to 1986 and given is the Z24 package as standard and sold ot for $2,000 less than what they had it would’ve been a different story.
Maybe even wait for the 1990 redesign and make it look like a baby Eldorado.
They probably could’ve gotten in on the N-body (Grand Am, Calais, Skylark) program early enough to make it as distinct of a Cadillac as the ’75 Seville had been.
I know Subaru is small but given the generally granola lean of their clientele I’m really surprised they have invested so little in hybrid tech let alone EVs. This already felt like a miss 10 years ago and now feels insanely short sighted-for years they’ve made some of the least fuel efficient vehicles in their class surely they didn’t think that was sustainable long term.
Subaru has arguably already muddied their ICE product strategy with the full suv-fiication of the Outback leaving even less air between it and the Forester or Ascent. But basically doubling their model offerings in the space of a year or so seems like poor strategy? Probably no way around it with all of these essentially being Toyotas, but it’s hard not to think they would’ve been better off with one or two focused, on-brand EV offerings instead of these weak ass GM-style badge engineered duds. Honestly disappointed in Toyota and Subaru they’ve been very slow to release EVs and now they’re finally rolling out a surprising amount of them and they just seem so half assed, like why even bother. Of course both brands have insanely loyal followings so no doubt they’ll sell a surprising number of them if gas prices continue to stay high.
I wanted to check out a Trailseeker and the response I got from the dealer(s) was, “put down a deposit and we will put you on the list” WTF I just want to sit in the freaking car before I buy it. There’s no inventory and the salesmen aren’t upfront about it. I used to find Subaru dealers to be less about games but my locals are putting a stink on the EVs.
Gross. Effing car sales people, also who are they kidding it’s hardly like they’re the only game in town.
Great avatar for your username! As I was scrolling down, I saw your username first and as I was processing it with my very primitive Latin, saw the pear and laughed out loud. Well played.
Subaru totally lost me as a customer when I drove one of their cars with a CVT in 2010 or so. What a piece of garbage.
I think they got better over the years though. My wife has a 2015 Legacy we bought because we got a crazy deal from a friend on it, and honestly while I wouldn’t want the CVT for myself it’s the best I’ve driven…which is admittedly a low bar. But for non enthusiast drivers I think it’s totally fine, pretty sure my wife doesn’t even realize it’s different than a typical automatic.
I also found it interesting that Subarus have poor mileage relative to competitors, when that seems like it would be important to their demographic. I suspect, like in all things, perception is more important than reality. Plus not a lot of motivation to change with their high level of loyalty, CR wins, etc.
I mean there is an argument that they offer a more robust AWD than many of their CUV competitors, certainly my wife’s car is fantastic in the snow, better than the one modern CUV I’ve actually had a chance to drive in the snow, a second gen Nissan Rogue.
But the MPG elephant in the room for me is that even the base RAV4 gets similar mpg to my wife’s Legacy sedan and by all accounts offers solid soft road capability so why isn’t the lower lighter car better? AND the RAV has been available as a very solid hybrid, which is what we’ll probably replace the Subaru with at some point.
But anyways yeh probably brand loyalty-for a long time they did have the non-truck reasonably priced AWD thing to themselves and built up a pretty big following in that time.
Good point, buyers might not be thinking along the lines of “this has bad mileage compared to a RAV4,” they’re thinking “it has good mileage compared to a 4Runner.”
It helps that a Subaru is 10% off MSRP all day, while a Toyota is +5%. Also they are indeed tanks in the snow, safe, and fairly reliable. I know plenty of people who put the AWD to work in the North Woods of Maine where a RAV4 would flail. Personally I didn’t like driving our 2018 Outback but my wife loved it.
SUVification, or making every sedan or wagon into a crossover, was primarily done for CAFE compliance. Now that CUVs are the baseline option for customers, they make designing a competent EV that much more difficult. They’re worse aerodynamically, heavier, and add significant cost in terms of pack size that price them out of the market.
Besides, Subaru has really held on to 3 things in the last 20 years.
Ah yeh forget about CAFE compliance, smh. And of course all those negatives apply to ICE vehicles too.
In general I agree with you re: Subaru, they do strike me as generally quite a conservative company (as much as some of their occasional wild styling excesses might make a person think otherwise). And I’m not necessarily picking on them, our household is currently home to two Subarus, I have kind of a love/hate relationship with them.
Crossoverfication doesn’t hit ICE/Hybrid nearly as bad as EV. With modern transmissions, ICE is in the relative sweet spot for efficiency at highway speeds, whereas EVs are very inefficient by comparison. The mass penalty is minimized, but electric motor efficiency drops significantly.
This is one of the reasons hybrids tend to be the best of both worlds, as they get the regen from city driving plus efficiency at speed from the engine/trans. If you have enough hybrid system to cover acceleration power, you can then further downsize the engine for even more high mph efficiency.
For example a family member has a newer Sienna Hybrid. The 189 hp 2.5L 4cyl would be woefully underpowered on it’s own, but the hybrid system total of 245hp with a much flatter power curve makes up for it. The result is you get 35-40 mpg regardless if you’re driving in the city or 70mph highway, and it’s a literal box on wheels. It’s not fast like the older 3.5L, but it gets way better milage than 16/23 (2007-2016 2GR-FE) or 18/25 (2017-2020, 2GR-FKS).
Good points! Though for argument’s sake the Camry hybrid with a similar drivetrain is supposedly good for another 15 mpg on the highway…but I take your point, 35+mpg in a minivan that’s got peppy acceleration is a real accomplishment.
NOBODY expects the Lucid exec team! Our chief priority is cash… cash and cost… cost and cash. Our two priorities are Quality and cash… and Culture… Our *three* priorites are Cash and Cost, Customer and Quality, and Culture and Team and an almost fanatical devotion to our shareholders. Our six… no… amongs our priorities… are such elements as cost, quality, cultures… I’ll come in again.
(runs to catch the bus while credits roll)
I really wish motorcycles weren’t dangerous. Put the pitchforks down, let me explain.
No matter how much skill a rider has, no matter how well they do in the MSF courses, nothing helps when you’re sharing the road with 6,000lb trucks driven by distracted, minimally trained drivers. If they hit you, you’ll probably be seriously hurt if you’re not killed.
I’d have gotten a motorcycle a very long time ago. It just makes sense for traveling alone, which I am 95% of the time. They’re cheap to operate, cheap to fuel, and easy enough to wrench on. They just make sense… until you factor in everybody else. I’d love to get one, but I don’t want to risk being turned into a pancake by a soccer mom in an Expedition or a dudebro in his Carolina squatting Silverado because they either couldn’t see me, or didn’t care enough to pay attention to their surroundings.
You learn to ride defensively. Every time I come up alongside a big truck, Metro bus, Mercedes/BMW, or Camry my first thought is “how are they going to try to kill me?” I identify their probably strike zones and avoid them or spend as little time as possible in them. This can be exhausting after a while though so I try to avoid riding in the metro area as much as possible too. My bike is almost entirely for weekend riding in the country and never for commuting in the city.
There’s riding (or driving) defensively, but wondering how you’ll die today each time you throw a leg over your bike seems like a crummy way to live, if you ask me.
I have no idea how to address the broad systemic issues that make riding more dangerous than it should be, but it seems to me that we all should be able to do so without the specter of death following closely behind.
This, plus the time factor, is why I sold my last motorcycle a few years ago. I was an “all the gear, all the time” rider. I would take 5-10 minutes putting on the gear while I waited for my bike to warm up, and then another 5-10 minutes at my destination to take it all off. Just so I could ride with my head on a swivel, trying to figure out which nearby drivers were on their phone. Or I could get in my car and be driving in 30 seconds with far less worry.
This is why I don’t commute on my motorcycle. Not only does it take time to put the gear on and off but my commute is also mostly stop and go. If I could split lanes the motorcycle would save me time but if I’m just going to sit in traffic with the cars I’ll drive the car.
Stop and go takes all the fun out of riding. The only time I used mine to commute was when the car was down for some reason.
Commuting on a motorcycle for the four years or so back in the early 80s helped me develop defensive riding/driving skills and the ability to detect subtle body movements that indicated someone near me was about to do something stupid/injurious. Those skills help now, many years down the road. I still putt around town on a scooter, and I don’t wear all the gear but a high viz windbreaker and a helmet are enough to make me less paranoid. And being able to park anywhere, including the sidewalk, saves me a lot of time running errands.
Exactly why I sold mine. Too many close calls by drivers staring at their phones.
Yeh that’s my thing with them, while not a motorcycle a buddy of mine got hit on his bike by a someone texting in their Suburban and is lucky to be alive.
A good buddy of mine has screws and titanium plates holding both his legs and one shoulder together thanks to a rough accident on a motorcycle that was entirely the other guy’s fault. He’s got all kinds of issues like arthritis that people shouldn’t have at 35. That was the last time he touched a motorcycle.
He laughed at me when I told him I was thinking about learning to ride, and I don’t blame him one bit. I figured I should learn from his experience.
Ugh that’s terrible, sorry to hear that. Of course I sometimes wonder if I’m just as crazy riding around town on a bicycle though I stick to the trails and designated bike lanes as much as possible.
Yep. First time I got hit by at car on my bike I was descending a mountain and the car was entirely in the wrong lane coming up hill around a blind turn. The second time was a car pulling out of a parking space without signaling or looking. Helicopter rides, surgeries, and such later, I do safer things like ice climbing and paragliding.
Ouch damn that’s gnarly, glad you made it out ok in the end.
This is why I bought a powerful PWC instead of a motorcycle. Vaguely the same experience of riding something that can toss the rider if not careful but with less hazard of being run over by a texting soccer parent. The fuel bill isn’t fun but it is safer.
I never got into motorcycles, but this is pretty much why I gave up road cycling. Way too many close calls, even though I rode with my head on a swivel.
I’ve broken bones on two different occasions while mountain biking, and I still feel safer in the woods than on the road.
I commute on a motorcycle most days, even in winter. It’s about 8 miles to my office on city streets, no highways. I’ve done it for years.
Wanna know how many accidents I’ve been in?
Zero.
Have there been some potentially close calls? A few, but nothing that has made me wanna park my bike.
I like riding, but generally, I don’t ride just for pleasure. It just makes commuting more fun. I don’t ride in groups, and I avoid heavy traffic whenever I can. I’ve been on long road trips on my bike and had no problems.
Maybe I’m an outlier, but I’m 55 and I’ve been riding off and on since I was 16. So far as my experience goes, it’s not THAT dangerous.
Motorcycles are dangerous primarily because I know myself too well and all the stupid stuff I’ve previously done and will likely try again.
This is something I struggle with. I have had a bike with a sidecar for the last 6 years and have lived in 4 different locations (I don’t recommend moving that often!). At two places, it was my only car and had zero issues. At one my commute was so short it took longer to get my gear on than the actual drive. At my current location, its dangerous.
I have already been at a crash were a car drove through the back of a bike assuming the light was about to turn green. I lost a friend when someone turning left cut through his lane and through him (he was stopped at a red and had nowhere to go). I gladly launched my crappy old 1985 C4 Corvette at a cop car to protect my friend on a bike that the police officer didn’t see; luckily no one touched.
But then again that same Corvette was ran over several times since people just didnt see it; and on two different occasions I had people aggressively cut off my Jeep trying to cross two lanes of traffic to make a freeway exit at the last minute, while the Jeep was on a flatbed trailer being towed by a truck…
I stopped riding after a lady pulled out in front of me in a minivan. I was going about 40 mph (not speeding) and I thought we had made eye contact about three times before she pulled out. I almost missed hitting her, but not quite. Totalled the bike and rolled down the road in traffic, just hoping nobody was going to run me over. I have examined it in my head many times and can not think of anything I could have done differently to avoid the crash. While I hate the idea of living life in a reactionary, hide from anything that might be a lttle dangerous, way, I could never be comfortable riding again.
You have to ride the the mindset that every single other driver out there sees you as a target or are invisible. When I was riding my Honda CB350 daily, and watch other riders, I would see another driver turn their head, stop their head turning when they see the motorcycle, then turn and aim directly at the motorcycle. After a few years of this, the carbs started to misbehave, and as I had some other air-cooled vehicles (VW bus, squareback, and bug) to drive, I let the bike sit and my mindset of extreme paranoia all the time gradually receeded and I felt normal again. So I sold the bike.
My motorcycle is the most expensive vehicle I own to operate on a cost per mile basis. Poor fuel mileage (45 mpg), premium fuel, tires that cost $600 but last 8,000 miles, valve adjustments every 6,000 miles….
“GM is killing the Chevy brand in China”
Some current or former marketing person at GM is gnashing their teeth over GM giving up on Chevy being a “global brand”
I recall years ago (before the bankruptcy) that someone at GM said that Chevy and Cadillac were to be global brands and the other brands were to be regional.
And around that time, they renamed the Daewoo cars sold in Europe as Chevrolets.
And they had the Chevrolet brand duplicating what the Opel and Vauxhall brands were already doing over there.
“What’s the most cursed car in history? What should have been delayed?”
Off the top of my head… The FWD GM X-body cars that came out in 1980… and released half baked.
Also the Chevy Vega with the aluminum 2.3 four cylinder that was also released half baked.
Both of these should have been delayed to allow engineers to work out the bugs.
It is odd. There really is no reason for GM to have any brand beyond Chevy and Cadillac.
If they push Cadillac up-market so their top end is around where Rolls-Royces and Bentley’s start (which they are starting to do with the Celestiq), then there is a case to be made to have Buick as the ‘affordable luxury’ brand as there would be a large gap between Chevy and Cadillac.
A car with ‘luxury’, but at a lower price and without the stuff that gets expensive as a car ages like air suspensions.
And in some places like China, there are social considerations. If your boss drives a Cadillac, if you buy yourself a Cadillac or other brand more or less on the same level, it can be seen as you trying to up-stage your boss… which is bad.
As a result, in that situation, you’d get the Buick.
Cadillac cannot move to a Rolls price point. In the 50’s and 60’s they were on par but they put out crap for so long that their reputation was ruined. Today they struggle to be seen as a competitor to BMW, Lexus, and Mercedes.
Buick is popular in China because for some reason that is the brand that GM chose to import to China decades back. That was a mistake.
GM’s solution to that mistake is to kill the Chevy brand in China and let Buick be their base brand which puts China out of sync with the rest of the world. GM still has too many brands for their limited volume and is wasting money and resources making redundant versions of the same vehicle and selling it under different brands.
The current CEO is also going to be chasing robo-taxis and also thinks the brand is a software centered company, despite the software being the (apparently) worst part of owning a Lucid.
I’ll be genuinely surprised if the they are still making cars in 5 years time.
They need to worry about selling more cars, not chasing stupid projects like a Robotaxi.
This is a key point that’s too often lost in complaints about “bean-counters” and such. I have an engineering degree and have worked with engineers my entire career. There’s no way I’d trust us to build a truly successful product on our own. Obviously other groups have their own blind spots and biases. Marketing alone or Accounting alone couldn’t build a good car either. The difference is everyone knows those attempts would be a disaster.
As a mechanical design engineer that worked for 30+ years designing product I will disagree a bit. Both places I worked were founded by design engineers and were grown into 25,000 and 1,500 employee companies. The founders of the companies clearly knew the markets they were addressing and were multi-dimensional people. In both cases when the founders stepped away and the MBAs took over management the companies lost focus and stagnated. One went from 25,000 employees to 3,000. Folks that have a strong engineering background can understand business. MBAs don’t seem to be able to build a technical product roadmap beyond what will make sure they get a good bonus the next quarter. From the outside it looks to me like in the past Lucid released products before engineering finished them. I saw that happen plenty of times in my career. I saw sales promise customers things that were not ready. I saw engineers that were too afraid to tell management that things were not ready. Lucid show signs of a company that has extremely poor management. All released products are very buggy and they have been very slow to fix them. They are constantly changing focus. Poor planning and poor execution.
I have both an engineering degree and an MBA, so my diplomatic response to this story (which I’ve seen play out to an extent too) is that different stakeholders in a project or company often have different incentives and priorities, and sometimes struggle to understand the reasoning behind choices that are made by other groups. I think it’s much too simplistic to say “engineering good” and “management bad”. Sometimes that’s true, sometimes it’s the other way around.
The reason that many people say engineering good and management bad is that even if engineering led decisions lead to suboptimal outcomes, most people can see that the intent was to make a good product.
On the other hand, blunders made by MBA types are so clearly caused by people trying to extract as much value as possible by exploiting the customer.
This is the reason why niche cars which on paper look like sales failures during their production run are more likely to go on to be cult classics that appreciate in value. The intention to create a good product persists and is recognized, even if the project misidentified the problem it was trying to solve.
I don’t think either of these is an ironclad rule. People, products, and companies fail for many reasons. Engineers as noble defenders of the product quality and management as evil parasitic leech on the customer are both far from universally true in my career.
This sounds like an organization that doesn’t value project managers and thinks that the people doing the work can manage their own projects.
Another example of what I see day to day as an example that makes life hard for everyone and delays product launches and whatnot. In general, I think it’s tough to put a finger on any one thing that causes these failures. Generally you have to look at leadership and culture if it’s systemic like it seems to be at Lucid.
I don’t know that it matters if engineers run things more or business people run them more from a decision-making POV. To me it starts with assigning clear ownership, RACIs and possibly (in the case of Lucid) clearly defining objectives and sticking to them.
For sure. Designer here, and if I always got my druthers, any product we launched would fail hard.
It’s tough to get the right team who can build a successful product, it’s even tougher to get leadership who can actually balance those teams’ input.