We drove about 625 miles today on our first real road trip in the Gravity. It was not without incident.
Range and Charging:
We got 2.4-2.5 mi/kWh, which was no surprise given our briefer earlier highway stints. But using Tesla Supercharging was great: arrived to find all the stations working, no lines, flawless connections, and enough charge speed to wish we had a bit more time to finish our business (bathroom, snacks, windshield cleaning). With this car’s access to SCs and its charging speed, I am of the Kyle Conner school — just drive it any way you want, and charge when you need to.
Road Manners and Comfort:
Beyond superb.
Software:
Miserable pile of shit. Instead of putting the final destination into the nav system, I entered each charge stop as the final destination for the next leg. At the first charge stop, I programmed in the next charge stop, verified the address showing on the screen and that it matched the 204-mile distance from Googlemaps, and set off. A few miles down the road, I glanced at the route map and it showed an unknown destination over 600 miles away. Since I knew I was staying on I-75, I figured I’d try to correct it at a convenient stopping place.
I then turned on ACC to try it out, and it worked very well . . . for a few miles. Suddenly, I started getting messages that DreamDrive was not functioning and then messages that stability control was disabled and that I should drive with caution. I then got another message telling me to call service. The car began to slow, so I turned off DreamDrive. The car continued to slow and with the accelerator to the floor the car would only go 51 mph. I put on the flashers and pulled over onto the right shoulder of the interstate and called Lucid Customer Service. They told me to do a soft reset, which I did to no result. So I was put on hold while they got Engineering on the call. They said their logs showed no malfunction and that they were going to have to do a hard reset which required that we exit the car for 5 minutes. However, they said they would not do it while we were on the side of an interstate and that I had to get to a safe place or wait for a tow truck. So we limped along at 51 mph for seven miles to the next exit and did the hard reset in a McDonald’s parking lot. That got us on the road — with all confidence destroyed in the safety and reliability of putting this car on the road.
And then . . .
About 20 miles further on a semi truck in the next lane over hit a piece of wood on the road and kicked it into the side of our car. We now have torn PPF and a sizable dent in the lower part of the right rear door.
And next . . .
At our final charge stop I opened the frunk to put something in it. Fortunately I did so while standing in front of it so that I saw something fall to the ground. It was the rubber bump stop from the right front of the lid. Thank goodness I noticed it and was able to retrieve the part and press fit it back into place.
I don’t even want to look at this damned car right now. And I am seriously rethinking taking delivery of the other Gravity Dream Edition that is now in production. My head will explode with much more of this.
