Your car can have the best brakes in the world, but if you can’t see well enough to know when you need to apply them, you’re going to end up hurting either yourself or someone else on the road or sidewalk.
That’s a particularly valid concern at this time of year for those living in colder areas. Without the ability to defrost our windshields, winter driving can become very dangerous, something certain Lucid Air drivers are discovering. The company found that some of the High Voltage Coolant Heater (HVCH) units fitted to its Air sedan are susceptible to internal delamination, which means coolant can’t be heated and the windshield can’t be defrosted.
So it’s recalling them to replace all the duff parts, right? No, and that’s what caught the attention of the NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI). Lucid has instead opted to apply a software update that identifies when the HVCH has stopped working and then warns the driver about the lack of defrosting capability by throwing a message on the digital instrument panel, recommending that the owner take his Air to a dealership to have the faulty component replaced.
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The ODI’s beef is that Jaguar uses the exact same Webasto-manufactured HVCH on its I-Pace electric crossover and its solution was to automatically replace the heater on all affected vehicles, rather than wait until they fail.
“The Office of Defects Investigation is concerned that by only providing a notification to drivers that their windshield defroster is not working, Lucid puts the driver in a situation where they could experience the failure during the same drive cycle as they receive the notification,” the ODI wrote. “In this scenario, the driver is not aware they have a failed HVCH until they are operating the vehicle and need the defrost function prior to being able to have the vehicle serviced.”
The ODI says it’s investigating the “adequacy and safety consequences” of Lucid’s response to the HVCH failure, so Air owners may yet find themselves getting their cars repaired before they’ve actually gone wrong, as I-Pace drivers have.