A Tale of Two Gravities (a tragicomic novel):
My partner went to the green Gravity this morning to leave for a tennis match. A few minutes later he came back in to show me a cell phone shot of the driver seat in full recline and asked me what to do. I told him others have reported the same problem on this forum and to reboot the car. He did and left for his match.
Shortly after noon I took the black Gravity to a medical appointment. On the way an earlier problem with the music going into pause repeatedly at frequent intervals resurfaced. After a few miles of driving, it corrected itself, and I made it to the appointment without further misbehavior.
I went back to the car after the appointment. When I opened the door, the car powered up, all the screens lit up, the climate control turned on, and music began to play. I took a second to switch albums, which the system did. I then put my foot on the brake pedal to put the car in gear. All the screens went instantly black, and the music and A/C shut off. I waited a while to see if they would come back on as sometimes happens with partial screen blackouts. Nothing happened.
After several minutes I tried a reboot. Nothing happened.
I called Lucid Customer care and got the voice prompts to choose Sales or Service. I chose Service and got a message that the call was being connected. After a few seconds I got another message saying that there was an "application error", and the call suddenly terminated. I tried again. Same thing. So I called the Miami Service Center. Same thing. (Maybe today's widespread AWS outage took Lucid down?)
It was 92º and I began to swelter, so I lowered the front windows, which were mysteriously still working, and called my partner to come get me. He arrived about twenty minutes later, during which time I tried a couple more reboots and kept trying to reach Lucid only to get the same "application error" messages.
When my partner arrived, I gathered my things to exit the car. But when I tried to close the windows they were now frozen in the down position. Rain was predicted for the afternoon, and I didn't want to leave the car open in a parking lot. So I tried to reach our mobile tech to see if he had any suggestions. No answer.
I decided I had no choice but to leave the car open and hope I could reach Lucid before it started raining. When I tried to open the driver door, it would not open until I pulled the latch very hard to engage the manual release. The horn immediately began blaring. So I got back into the car and closed the door, hoping that would stop the horn. It didn't, but the horn cut itself off after another minute or so. I kept trying to close the windows, and the driver window finally raised about an inch and then froze again. We went through this whole drill a second time (including another blasting horn). After this second cycle, the car suddenly sprang back to life, with everything working (almost).
I had another appointment but decided to skip it, as I dared not go through this again and just wanted to get the damned car home in one piece. As I drove off, I noticed the passenger window had lowered about a third of the way. I raised it again, and it again lowered itself about a third of the way. I tried lowering the window all the way and then raising it. Same thing. Wondering if I had something handy to slit my wrists, I drove off while constantly trying to get the passenger window to stay closed. This continued with the window going up and down for several miles until it finally stayed closed.
I had real hopes that the black Gravity we received three months after the green Gravity would be more problem-free, but those hopes are now gone.
There is NO FUCKING WAY I will put either of these cars on a road trip at this point, and now I won't even use them locally if we're carrying other people. -- two of the main reasons I wanted these Gravities. We'll be keeping our Honda Odyssey for that.
Lucid ought to fire every damn person who had anything to do with the user software in this car and farm the work out to an outfit that knows what it's doing.
Yet Lucid just plows along, putting more of these cars not only into customers' hands, but now loaning them out to car reviewers who are finding out about the interminable key fob entry/start issues and, even worse, with Tom Moloughney of widely-watched "State of Charge" getting a car with a faulty drive unit that badly fumbled his range test and would not work at a Tesla Supercharger (another reason I wanted a Gravity).
I already know that I'm going to have to eat the loss on my Lucid stock position. I've now got to decide whether I'm even keeping the cars.
But I still remember what after market audio installl could do to break pillar airbags due to custom heat sensitive retention clips, and I can’t help but think that anybody who’s not a Lucid employee who’s willing to take apart the car is VERY brave.
