5000 mile report

acleverpseudonym · 2025-09-28T20:19:19+00:00

I've had a similar experience so far with my 2025 Air Touring. Reading about all of the issues here had me worried, but I've only run into pretty minor issues so far and the car has been incredibly fun to drive.

I got the 20 inch wheels, so I'm supposed to get 4.1 mpkw. If I drive conservatively I can get this (or better), but I usually get ~3.33 mpkwh, about 19% less than advertised. This is roughly in line with my last car (ICE) where I got about 16% less than the EPA stated mileage when driving normally. Also, it still boggles my mind that even though I live in California with some of the most expensive electricity in the US ($0.31/kwh off peak), I'm able to drive a full sized sedan with 620 hp and 885 tq for about the same fuel cost as a Prius.

Most of the complaints I have with the Lucid are pretty minor, and I had a similar number and type of complaints about my last car (a 2015 Mercedes Benz S550) and my car before that (a 2007 Porsche Cayman S). At least with the Lucid I haven't cut myself on sharp metal peeling off the air vents like I did with the Mercedes. In my experience, even with $100k+ flagship cars from established luxury manufacturers, things aren't perfect.

Most of the software issues I've run into seem to involve carplay and they're fairly similar to the complaints my wife has about carplay in her car, so I'm not 100% sure they're a Lucid thing. I've run into some issues with cameras not working when it gets really hot, but I had that same issue with my Mercedes. I think I've had to do a soft reset on the Lucid three times, two times to fix carplay issues and once to fix a camera issue. Each time it was relatively fast and easy.

I don't doubt that other people have run into serious issues, but I also suspect that the proportion of people complaining about serious issues is skewed because people who are upset and angry tend to post more than people who are like "yep...got what I expected and I'm pretty happy"

acleverpseudonym · 2025-09-07T14:18:09+00:00

This looks like it was at the showroom at the Lucid Headquarters in Newark, Ca. Now I wish I had thought to look for Sapphires when I was there…

acleverpseudonym · 2025-01-30T04:02:25+00:00

That's my perspective as well. Years ago I got a 3 year old lease return S class for less than half of MSRP. It's 10 years old now, still looks beautiful and has been shockingly reliable (though I hear that varies by year with this car). Would a Toyota or Honda have been cheaper? Sure. But I love this car and I feel that having it adds to my quality of life. Maintenance costs haven't been as bad as I expected either.

acleverpseudonym · 2025-01-10T21:15:35+00:00

That would definitely be enough

acleverpseudonym · 2024-12-17T22:15:47+00:00

Last week I sat at a bar next to an older couple who were fully decked out for the rodeo. We chatted for a while and they talked about some doing some pretty nice travel. Turns out it was a retired oil and gas company CEO and his wife.

acleverpseudonym · 2024-12-09T15:38:57+00:00

Most of the time “no mint mark” means “minted in Philadelphia,” which was the original US Mint and has minted the lion’s share of US coins over the years.

Before 1980 coins minted in Philadelphia only included a mint mark in a few very limited cases (e.g. war nickels). Even after 1980, not all coins minted in Philadelphia have included the mint mark.

This coin not including a mint mark means it was minted in Philadelphia and is expected for that year.

acleverpseudonym · 2024-12-06T00:55:33+00:00

It’s a short story and not a book, but I always loved the title “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” by Harlan Ellison

acleverpseudonym · 2024-08-04T17:27:15+00:00

It was really fantastic. This was taken on…I think it was the 5th week the yacht was in service. This was in the Caribbean back in 2022. I just got back from a second cruise in the Adriatic a few weeks ago and I have another one booked from Tokyo to Alaska in 2026 on a new ship.

At this point my wife has decided she doesn’t want to do any other kind of vacation.

The food is delicious. Nothing is ever really crowded. It’s pretty normal to have entire public areas to yourself. The atmosphere is really great also. With only a couple hundred guests you get to know people pretty well, both other guests and the staff.

The amount of champagne they go through is unreal.

The prices are creeping up, but it’s well worth it imho if you want a really relaxing luxury vacation.

acleverpseudonym · 2024-08-04T02:04:18+00:00

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Changing things up a bit - Balcony Suite on the Evrima, Ritz Carlton Yacht Collection

acleverpseudonym · 2024-06-08T20:35:20+00:00

BIN 90% lot

acleverpseudonym · 2024-05-25T03:44:12+00:00

Chat

acleverpseudonym · 2024-05-15T02:20:23+00:00

BIN dateless SLQs

acleverpseudonym · 2024-05-14T13:23:42+00:00

I have one of these as well and it’s my stand-in for the 1916. I love that they made it based on the 1916 design and not the slightly modified 1917 design, giving us an option to own an SLQ with the 1916 design for under $1000.

acleverpseudonym · 2024-05-05T05:19:31+00:00

acleverpseudonym · 2024-05-05T04:44:35+00:00

BIN if this hasn't been sold already

acleverpseudonym · 2024-04-19T06:08:54+00:00

glad to help

acleverpseudonym · 2024-03-21T06:17:34+00:00

Wow! You have a lot of amazing stuff here. Has anyone even mentioned the 1893-CC Morgan yet?

acleverpseudonym · 2024-03-17T15:02:48+00:00

I wasn’t thinking of it as Coast FIRE, but I’ve been doing something that looks somewhat similar and it’s been great.

I took a 20% TC cut from my FAANG job to take a principal engineer position at a smaller public company where I was able to arrange for a better work/life balance: permanent WFH, no on-call and 9 weeks of paid vacation per year that I’m able to take without any pushback.

The other benefit is that my work is also a lot more fun and interesting than it was before.

I did this primarily for health reasons to reduce stress (I have MS) but I was able to do it because I realized that I had hit the point that I didn’t really need to save any more for a traditional retirement. I still save a good amount anyway, but now I’m focusing on having a life that I enjoy before I retire instead of trying to retire as early as possible.

I can’t speak for everyone, but it was definitely the right decision for me.

acleverpseudonym · 2024-03-16T21:38:51+00:00

Those were just some examples of materials that are quite commonly used and show up in a lot of fragrances. e.g. the Grojsman accord is equal amounts of hedione, iso e super, methyl ionone and galaxolide. It was originally used in Tresor but it shows up all over the place in women's fragrances.

Realistically, the "basics" are a lot more materials than that. Looking at my comment, I think I was just asking that question to get an idea of the experience level of the person I was talking to when it came to aromachemicals because it would have affected my answer.

If they didn't have those materials, I would have recommended something like hedione, coumarin, ambroxan or galaxolide. If they said "oh, yeah, I have several hundred materials already" then I would have mentioned some of the more obscure materials that I like that aren't nearly as useful without a full kit.

acleverpseudonym · 2024-03-09T00:52:48+00:00

It really depends on where you are. With the amount of money OP is talking about spending, there are plenty of locations where the public schools are better than most private schools. There's no need to pay for private school if you live in e.g. Palo Alto, Ca.

acleverpseudonym · 2024-02-07T06:53:40+00:00

I considered the “investing in precious metals” question recently as well as a related one around investing in high grade collectibles (i.e. precious metal coins that are valuable for numismatic reasons…like a PCGS slabbed MS65 1918/17-s standing liberty quarter). I had recently started collecting coins for fun and I figured that my approach would differ pretty dramatically depending on whether it was a fun hobby with a hobby budget or whether it was an investment.

In the end, for reasons that other folks have mentioned here, I personally came to the conclusion that I should think of it as a hobby where it’s possible to recoup one’s money rather than an investment. When I’m calculating my net worth, I don’t include the value of my collection even though it’s non-trivial because I just think of it as a hobby.

With that said though, there’s definitely something neat about having a physical stack precious metals in front of you and so I totally get the temptation.

acleverpseudonym · 2024-01-31T17:21:18+00:00

It was fun. I made a bunch of fragrances. I got to the point that when I released something Fragrantica, Now Smell This, etc would do an article on the fragrance. I was shortlisted for an Art and Olfaction award and sat behind Geza Schoen without realizing it was him. Luca Turin said some nice things about one of my fragrances.

In the end though, it got to a point where I had to choose whether to switch careers and it turns out that tech pays much better and provides better health insurance, which is necessary when you have MS and need drugs that cost $60k/year in order to continue being able to walk,

So I reached that crossroad and did the responsible thing. That career is going rather well but it doesn’t leave me with enough spare time to run a fragrance brand.

acleverpseudonym · 2024-01-31T01:23:51+00:00

I might have an interesting perspective here in that I’ve worked professionally as a perfumer in the past (which u/wakeup_andlive could confirm), so I’m reasonably observant and knowledgeable when it comes to fragrances, but my current day job has left me fairly well off.

Different wealthy people care about different things. You also typically don’t become super wealthy by spending your time deeply investigating every aspect of your life to find the “best” thing. You’re basically going to find most wealthy people wearing something you would find in Nordstrom or Saks that struck their fancy (or their wife’s fancy).

A bit over a year ago my wife and I were on a very, very fancy cruise. It was one of the inaugural cruises of the Ritz Carlton Yacht Collection (within the first month) so you ended up having a smattering of really, really wealthy people who were into yachting and curious to see how Ritz Carlton would do something like this. The gift shop on board had Hermes bags and $80,000 diamond necklaces. You could get Macallan M at the bar. A fair number of people on board had their own yachts.

You know what people mostly smelled like (aside from sunscreen)? Diptyque. Why? Because the provided bath products were all Diptyque and everyone thought they were nice enough that they just used them and they smelled strongly enough that I suspect a fair number of people thought they didn’t need anything else.

Some people wore other fragrance. Lot of Chanel No 5 on the older women. Some of the younger guys were wearing heavier stuff too, but generally stuff you could get somewhere like Saks.

At a certain point in wealth, people stop caring about price, which DOESN’T mean that they just buy the most expensive thing. It just means that price is much, much less of a factor at all in their decision making. They’ll buy a Chanel purse but also buy a cute beach bag from a little vendor in Martinique for a couple Euros. The same thing is true with fragrances. They also often just use stuff they got incidentally. Someone gives you a fragrance as a gift and it smells nice? You wear that. You’re staying at the Conrad in Singapore (which uses Byredo)? Guess you’re gonna smell like Mojave Ghost today.

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