Auction houses with damaged cars are great places to shop if you’re looking for a discount and willing to put in some work on a vehicle that has suffered a nasty fate, from crashes and floods, to vandalism and theft. Two new electric lots, though, may be too far gone for even the most optimistic and capable of buyers.
A pair of launch edition Lucid Airs have ended up on the sites’ storage lots in Florida and Massachusetts. The linking factor is the extensive fire damage that has taken place. As is normally the case on these sites, detailed information about what led to the fire is not provided.
For the Lucid in Florida that’s listed by Copart, though, there is at least a hint. Although the fire damage is the most visible cause of damage (and the color is listed as “Burn”), the “Primary Damage” is listed as “WATER/FLOOD.” Being held at a lot in Punta Gorda, near Fort Myers, it seems likely that flood damage led to a fault of some kind, eventually causing the car to catch fire.
Read: A Lucid Air Dream Edition Was Burnt To A Crisp On A Transport Truck In Massachusetts
Copart
Even though photos of the car in Massachusetts that’s listed by IAAI are not available, the extent of the damage to the Air Dream Edition in Florida is significant. The seats are burned down to their frames, the roof has either melted or been cut off, one of the doors appears to have been seared through, and no soft materials remain.
As has been reported, fires in electric vehicles can be particularly aggressive as a result of the lithium-ion batteries contained within them. These can enter something called thermal runaway and burn for hours. In the aftermath of a fire that recently destroyed a Tesla Model S, firefighters said they used 24 times more water putting it out than they would expect to use while putting out a fire in a vehicle with an internal combustion engine.
A study of fires looking at the rates of incidents in electric, hybrid, and internal combustion vehicles, though, showed that, in 2021, there were just 25.1 fires per 100,000 vehicles in EVs, as compared to 1,529.9 per 100,000 in ICE vehicles. Hybrid vehicles were at the highest risk of catching fire, though, with a rate of nearly 3,500 per 100,000.
That’s unlikely to be of any comfort to the former owners of these vehicles, though. The Lucid Air Dream Edition was the launch trim of the new, luxurious electric sedan. In its highest-performance trim, the Dream Edition is capable of making 1,111 hp (828 kW/1,126 PS), and in its longest-range variant, the model is capable of going up to 520 miles (836 km) on a charge. Or, rather, it was.
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