Completely agree. I'm just a tech guy and one of the things that attracts me to cars like the Lucid, Rivian etc. is upgrade ethos.
Lucid decided to go a different route with the hardware on Gravity, despite it being only their second vehicle. This is not "normal" in the auto industry. But it was the right move. The Air was Lucid's first car, and while they nailed the engineering on all the car bits, the computer systems were not exactly ideally situated. This leads to limitations with the Air's software that I'm sure Lucid wants to get past as soon as possible. Thus, Gravity getting not only a much more powerful new chip, but a new computer system design overall.
What that means for the software stack is anyone's guess. But the slower update cadence on Air right now could be directly related to the fact they need to finish off Gravity's stack before launch later this year. Some of that work will likely trickle its way to Air, but there will almost certainly be some features in Gravity that will not be possible on the Air's "older" computer system.
How much they can still share is the open question. Hopefully more than I'm thinking.
If it were me, I'd be pushing management to get the updated physical system of Gravity into Air sometime in the next few years. Then they can have a true shared stack between the two cars. Car companies generally don't like upgrading entire systems that quickly on the production side, but in this case it may be worth it to get past the "old" architecture before they have hundreds of thousands of cars to maintain on the older platform.
Companies like Rivian and Tesla put almost the exact same computer systems in every car. This is ideal for software development, as you just throw in a few flags for the small features that are unique to a particular model, and you're done. (Oversimplified, I know.) These companies also have much larger software teams than Lucid. As a result, they have a much quicker pace in their updates. But at the expense of cars like the R3 coming in a few years that will effectively have a computer system that is more than five years old at launch. Maybe the average person doesn't notice this. And maybe their initial design was "good enough" where this won't matter.
I don't think Air's computer system is good enough to have made this a smart choice. I think it's great Lucid recognized this and is doing the hard work in the short term to make Gravity a better car at launch.
Personally, I like Lucid's philosophy of "don't just do the cheap and easy thing". It differentiates them as a brand. They could easily have slapped different body panels, propped up the seats, and shipped Gravity as a tall Air with the same computer flaws and driving dynamics compromises others would have. But they didn't. Maybe that will cost them money short term, but it wins them customers like me, for sure.
