A Lucid Air caught fire at a demo drive event over the weekend. While the cause of the fire has not yet been made public, it is just the latest setback facing the struggling automaker.
Lucid has had their fair share of troubles getting customers to order one of their Air luxury electric sedans. Over the course of last year the company was seeing the number of reservations drop by more than the number of cars being delivered, indicating customers were cancelling their orders before they were finalized. The drop in reservations over successive quarters was bad enough that Lucid stopped reporting the number in their most recent quarterly update earlier this year.
To help get more potential customers behind the wheel of the Air, the company has been holding a ‘Dream Ahead’ demo drive event across the US. At one of those events last weekend a Lucid Air Pure, the entry-level variant of the luxury electric sedan, went up in flames, giving the worst possible impression to potential customers.
According to u/protectivedetective on Reddit, the potential Lucid customer was getting ready to take their demo drive in a Grand Touring variant when the base model Air Pure parked a few spots away started smoking. The Air Pure was stationary and not plugged in to a charger. While no timeline was provided for how quickly the situation evolved, the Redditor said the smoke became flames. Two fire trucks attended the scene and were able to extinguish the fire, but the front end of the car was completely destroyed. Fortunately it appears as though no one was injured, and no other vehicles were damaged by the fire.
We have reached out to Lucid for comment on the fire and a possible cause, but the company has not responded by the time of publication. Since the fire appears to have been quickly extinguished, and since it appears to have been contained to the front of the EV, the high voltage battery does not appear to have been the cause. Based on the photos of the damage it looks like the fire started at the front left of the Air, suggesting a possible problem with the 12V battery that could have caused the fire. We will update this story when we receive a response from Lucid.
Here is a brief video of the fire.
