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Does the Air DD Premium have the hardware for lane assist??

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RajD

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This is part curiosity and part annoyance. With the Gravity, DD premium got hands-on lane assist for highway. But this is not the case for the Air. Is it a hardware issue? Anyone know if they plan an upgrade (paid perhaps?) to allow owners to add this?

I’m certain this is low priority for Lucid with all the other concerns, but curious if maybe UX 3.0 may open the door to this when it comes.
 
It’s missing several cameras at least so I’d think no
 
but many cheaper cars have basic lane centering and I doubt they have advanced camera sensors to do so. I’ve read lucid could choose to write a vision only lane centering and add that via OTA to DD premium cars but doesn have bandwidth for it. Trying to understand if that’s really true.
 
Yeah I’ve always wondered this as well. I always thought if they could offer the equivalent of basic autopilot as Tesla did it would’ve made it more compelling and competitive.
 
I asked this question at a recent owner's event, they said it was missing hardware to accomplish hands on lane centering and there is no upgrade path. Every car that I've driven in the last 10 years has had this feature apart from my Touring. As much as I love driving my Lucid this issue and SSP is disappointing.
 
DS9 said:
I asked this question at a recent owner's event, they said it was missing hardware to accomplish hands on lane centering and there is no upgrade path. Every car that I've driven in the last 10 years has had this feature apart from my Touring. As much as I love driving my Lucid this issue and SSP is disappointing.
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Yeah sort of a mind boggling missed opportunity.
 
DS9 said:
I asked this question at a recent owner's event, they said it was missing hardware to accomplish hands on lane centering and there is no upgrade path. Every car that I've driven in the last 10 years has had this feature apart from my Touring. As much as I love driving my Lucid this issue and SSP is disappointing.
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so, what I read is that Lucid’s lane centering was designed to heavily rely on Lidar. But obviously Tesla (and many others) is doing it without LiDAR. So if Lucid is claiming that’s the ‘hardware’ the DD Premium Air is missing, it’s basically laziness or lack of bandwidth to generate a vision-based lane centering capability. I don’t know if that’s ever been detailed publicly by Lucid though.

The claim that the DD Premium Air lacks several cameras seems unlikely. Here’s what I am reading :

‘
Yes, hardware-wise, it does. The Lucid Air with DreamDrive Premium possesses both a Front Narrow Angle Camera and a Front Wide Angle Camera. This dual-front camera layout provides more than enough visual data to calculate lane boundaries and support a vision-based full lane centering system. [1, 2]
However, Lucid restricts full lane centering to software on a business level’
 
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DD Premium is missing one lidar and seven cameras compared to DD Pro. It takes an incredible amount of engineering to develop ADAS software, and it doesn’t make sense for Lucid to divert resources to automatic centering on the DD Premium sensor platform. Even Tesla dropped automatic lane centering (autopilot) in favor of FSD.

As shown in a post from 2023, it’s clear that automatic lane centering only came with DD Pro. Those who purchased DD Premium made their choice to forgo that capability.
 
Saksak said:
DD Premium is missing one lidar and seven cameras compared to DD Pro. It takes an incredible amount of engineering to develop ADAS software, and it doesn’t make sense for Lucid to divert resources to automatic centering on the DD Premium sensor platform. Even Tesla dropped automatic lane centering (autopilot) in favor of FSD.

As shown in a post from 2023, it’s clear that automatic lane centering only came with DD Pro. Those who purchased DD Premium made their choice to forgo that capability.
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I am not suggesting that DD Premium owners should have lane centering. They shouldn’t. I’m trying to understand if it’s really a hardware issue or just a software one that is the difference, since lane centering is so widely available on far less capable cars. Your reply suggests it’s maybe both? Or maybe software ?

Also Tesla didn’t stop autopilot because it was going to be hard to build. They had already built it and it worked really well. That was a business decision.
 
RajD said:
Also Tesla didn’t stop autopilot because it was going to be hard to build. They had already built it and it worked really well. That was a business decision.
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Er, not quite. Tesla discontinued its standard basic Autopilot feature for new vehicle purchases in the U.S. and Canada to resolve pressure from regulatory bodies over misleading marketing names and to transition buyers toward its subscription-based Full Self-Driving (Supervised).

CA DMV and other regulators flagged the "Autopilot" moniker as misleading. Authorities argued the name implied a level of autonomous driving capability that the Level 2 hardware and software did not legally or technically achieve without driver supervision. Facing legal ultimatums and deadlines regarding its retail sales licenses, Tesla opted to drop the branding and remove the Autopilot feature from standard configurations.


Also, one more very simple reason: massively increasing FSD subs are a huge piece of Musk’s trillion dollar pay package.
 
Thanks for the details behind the decision , some of which I had forgotten, and I agree with all of that. It wasn’t due to difficulty of achieving or maintaining the technical feat of autopilot without LiDAR.

To me, it seems the Air DD Premium cars may have sufficient cameras to have some form of lane centering but there is simply no plan to build/deliver that software to them. And that’s a valid, albeit frustrating, business reason for Lucid to not offer or promise it. But it’s misleading to abstract it away as a lack of hardware, which doesn’t make sense.
 
RajD said:
Thanks for the details behind the decision , some of which I had forgotten, and I agree with all of that. It wasn’t due to difficulty of achieving or maintaining the technical feat of autopilot without LiDAR.

To me, it seems the Air DD Premium cars may have sufficient cameras to have some form of lane centering but there is simply no plan to build/deliver that software to them. And that’s a valid, albeit frustrating, business reason for Lucid to not offer or promise it. But it’s misleading to abstract it away as a lack of hardware, which doesn’t make sense.
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I have long hoped this would be a subscription option and a revenue stream for Lucid.
 
RajD said:
I am not suggesting that DD Premium owners should have lane centering. They shouldn’t. I’m trying to understand if it’s really a hardware issue or just a software one that is the difference, since lane centering is so widely available on far less capable cars. Your reply suggests it’s maybe both? Or maybe software ?

Also Tesla didn’t stop autopilot because it was going to be hard to build. They had already built it and it worked really well. That was a business decision.
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It’s probably both a business and practical decision. What is the market size and return on investment for lane centering just for DDPremium when you are focused on a DDPro system? If it was simply dialing back the DDPro software and was easy to do, maybe it makes business sense. If it’s rewriting major pieces of code and/or training an entirely new AI model based on 5 cameras instead of 12 cameras+lidar, would the incremental revenue gain offset developing essentially two lane centering systems? Even if the market is there, is it worth splitting focus and putting in the effort now, or should Lucid focus 100% on getting DDPro to L3++? Developing an automatic lane centering system based on DDPremium may be tactically possible but probably does not make strategic sense for Lucid.

In any case, Lucid made their decision, regardless of what we may wish for. Unless things change, for us end customers, the decision we must make is: do I value automatic lane centering enough to pay for DDPro, or do I want to forgo automatic lane centering and spend my money elsewhere?
 
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