I have a gravity DE. Picked it up in June, yes SW had multiple issues. Latest 3.3.20 release solves many if not most of those issues. Yet there's still so much negativity here . . . .
I just don't get it.
But a much much smaller percentage of people with great experiences will look to share that broadly with others. I mean, who ever says "man this is a fantastic product! I need to go tell people." But if your car is bricked on day two of ownership, you are definitely looking for info about your car, and you end up on a forum ready to share your bad experience.
I live at both ends of this spectrum. I am a four-year Lucid owner who currently has three Lucids: an Air Dream Performance and two Gravity Dream Editions. I am damn near addicted to the brand. And over these four years I have heaped both praise and scorn on Lucid for what they get right and what they get wrong. However, I only speak of Lucid in other venues (YouTube, Reddit, various auto journal comment sections) when I have something good to say. But this is an owner's forum, and we should be completely candid with each other here.
What Lucid gets right makes them, to my mind, the most interesting automaker on the planet right now: cutting-edge efficiency, space engineering, handling dynamics, and a near-perfect blend of retro and futuristic design done with taste that has departed the premium German brands.
But the Gravity, frankly, has been something of a mess on a scale to put the company's budding reputation at risk. Lucid brought all the good things I just listed to the Gravity, but they released the car before it was ready.
Our first Gravity left us stranded on an out-of-state trip when its rear drive unit failed. We had to drive with a towel over the HUD screen until the dashboard could be pulled out to replace the HUD unit for a distortion issue that would have been caught had Lucid bothered to look through the windshield of the car before shipment or delivery. The second-row seat had to be jury-rigged to stop its squeaking. I'm now waiting for an appointment to get the steering wheel replaced. The car was delivered with the GPS system and the navigation system not working, again something that a basic pre-delivery inspection would have caught.
For the first ten months our 2022 Air had similar software nightmares to our Gravities, but they were eventually largely fixed, as I'm sure the Gravities' will be . . . eventually.
But we had nowhere near the hardware issues with that early production Air that we have had with the Gravity. And that is something that should not have happened with a car produced four years later. And I'm going to talk about it on this forum, whether it pleases some people or not.
Far more important than what I think, though, is what is happening with car reviewers. Everyone understood teething issues with the Air, and that car racked up an impressive global array of well-deserved major awards. But everyone expected the Gravity launch to reflect a maturing operation. And that they have not seen. Consequently, the Gravity has fallen out of the running for many of the awards that a year ago most of the press was expecting it to monopolize. It didn't even make it to the finalist list for SUV of the Year by Motor Trend, a company that made the Air its 2022 Car of the Year. If foundered more recently with InsideEVs top award, again after having been expected a year ago to walk away with it. And so it has gone with most other reviewers.
So, like it or not, this forum is no more negative about the Gravity than the wider world of auto journalism. And that's the way it's going to be until Lucid gets it act together.
I'd lot rather be beating them up about the misstep they made in putting the Gravity on the market before it was ready than beating them up for doing it again with the Earth . . . because if they do it with that car, the company will have signed its death warrant.
