Buying a 1,000-horsepower electric SUV for €122,000 and selling it after only a few weeks, with a little over 640 km on the clock and losing almost €16,000. That’s what happened to a driver who decided to make a grand entrance into the world of 100% electric cars. It wasn’t that he had an accident or a breakdown: the problem was that there was nowhere to plug it in.
With no home charger and no possibility to install one because there wasn’t a garage, his plan was to plug it in at work every day, where there were charging posts. The trouble is that those posts broke down just when he bought it and repairs would take months.
A problem with no solution
Residing in Brooklyn (New York), this driver bought a Lucid Gravity Dream Edition, the most expensive version of the American firm’s electric SUV. He paid $141,550, about €122,300 at current exchange rates. This 100% electric SUV delivers 1,083 HP (797 kW), with two motors providing all-wheel drive and, in its top configuration, it included extra packages for driving dynamics, technology, and luxury interior, plus a panoramic roof and a third row of seats.
He purchased it at the end of September, thrilled to be arriving in a brand-new electric SUV of this caliber. Yet the joy didn’t last long. When he went to work, he found that the many chargers in the parking area were not functioning. His plan to charge at the workplace was derailed. This wasn’t an isolated incident; they had been out of service for months: “Apparently there are no plans to fix them. Since I don’t have a home charger and I can’t install one, this has turned into a problem with no solution,” he explains in the Cars & Bids listing.
Faced with such a predicament, he had no choice but to sell it: he put it up for auction in October on this platform. Prospective buyers wondered what had driven him to sell a car bought just a month earlier with barely 400 miles (378 miles, about 600 km) on the odometer. And how he hadn’t realized that the outlets weren’t working. “The chargers seemed to be functioning (screens on and all). But after needing my first charge (the car’s official range is around 600 km), I discovered that they were broken and had not worked since March 2025,” he explains in the comments.
With no option to charge at home, he searched for alternatives, but: “In New York, most nearby chargers were in paid parking facilities with exorbitant prices to use them. Yes, I should have planned better.”
Lost $18,500
It wasn’t a good business. In the Lucid Gravity sale listing, the purchase price was shown as the car’s value: the $141,550 he paid. No matter how new it was, cars depreciate as soon as they leave the showroom, but he was still trying to recover as much of the investment as possible.
As noted, the highest bid stopped far short of that initial price: $123,000. This meant that for a car used only a few days, he lost $18,500 (about €16,000). If you account for the mileage, each mile driven cost him almost €40.
This case demonstrates that relying on external charging carries risk: while owning a garage and a wallbox isn’t mandatory, it is highly advisable. It also brings to light one of the typical barriers to EV adoption: the charging network beyond home. In our reader survey about whether they would buy an electric car, the underdeveloped charging network was cited as one of the main deterrents to switching to a fully electric vehicle.
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