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Flappy Bird Issue and Loud Climate Controls

GTdreamer said:
I have been trying to get an appointment but they keep saying they are only taking cars with bigger problems. They also insisted that this is a software issue, which doesn’t make sense to me.
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Well, it is hard for an outsider to be sure of the root cause, so it's not impossible that they're correct. But it's not a happy state for them to be so backlogged with service complaints that they cannot deal with you. It seems clear that they're still at an early stage where some of the hardware components aren't as robust as they should be, and the frequency of service being needed is thus high. I have to wonder if their service backlog is causing them to spin a tale for you, rather than them actually being sure of the root cause. We have seen cases of other owners reporting hardware problems that were originally dismissed by the service team, before eventually being proven to require a hardware replacement.
 
Well this is happening to me now -- brand new Gravity DE. For me, it's the driver door. Constantly cycling open and closed while driving, even at highway speeds, for my entire trip on my last two consecutive half-hour drives. I have no reason to think it isn't permanent at this point.

I also picked mine up from Tysons, so your experience with them telling you it's no big deal and they're not gonna address it in a timely fashion is EXTREMELY concerning! This is a pretty serious issue if you ask me!

 
kinda weird that this only happens while the car is in drive and not parked, which makes me think it could be related to an auto lock option and some kind of misalignment of the door handle. does it happen in reverse as well?
 
eelpout said:
kinda weird that this only happens while the car is in drive and not parked, which makes me think it could be related to an auto lock option and some kind of misalignment of the door handle. does it happen in reverse as well?
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Good questions. All I know without testing is it stops whenever the car is unlocked (which happens automatically when the car is in park).

Also you can’t unlock the doors while driving.
 
Have you tried toggling the passive lock, unlock settings on/off? Just taking a flyer here.
 
I also happens to me as soon I start driving. I tried turning off the auto lock and unlock, but it didn’t help.

I finally got the SC to put me on the schedule, end of January.
 
Hmm, so I might have this issue as well. I've noticed that for some drives, I hear a mechanical open-and-close behind my ear, but I haven't had a chance to check my rear-view mirrors to see whether it's the external handle latching and unlatching.

The thing is, I haven't had this issue until I asked the SC to look at my previous door handles b/c they seemed too tight, and they took my car into the shop for a week and ended up replacing 3 of the 4 door handles. The service rep. mentioned that they're now on version 8 of the handles (which is what they swapped out mine with; my DE was built in Sept.), and that they also had to OTA firmware for the new handles as well. If I can confirm that it's indeed the door handles flapping, then I'll see if I can at least file a bug report.
 
allenmhc said:
Hmm, so I might have this issue as well. I've noticed that for some drives, I hear a mechanical open-and-close behind my ear, but I haven't had a chance to check my rear-view mirrors to see whether it's the external handle latching and unlatching.

The thing is, I haven't had this issue until I asked the SC to look at my previous door handles b/c they seemed too tight, and they took my car into the shop for a week and ended up replacing 3 of the 4 door handles. The service rep. mentioned that they're now on version 8 of the handles (which is what they swapped out mine with; my DE was built in Sept.), and that they also had to OTA firmware for the new handles as well. If I can confirm that it's indeed the door handles flapping, then I'll see if I can at least file a bug report.
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Is it happening to one of the door handles they replaced?
 
I have a theory about the 'flappy bird' door handles and a recent discussion with a local Lucid service tech seems to line up with my theory.

I had no issues with the door handles until our first cold spell of the year a couple weeks ago when temperatures dropped below freezing. The front passenger side door handle started flipping in and out approximately every 3 seconds while the car is in drive, moving and not moving. I noticed it because of the somewhat loud clunking sound from the passenger door. I park my Gravity in a closed garage and noticed the 'flapping' did not start until about 20 mins into the drive in temps in the 30s and below. When the weather warmed up into the 50s, flapping pretty much stopped. Temps declined below 30 again this week and, sure enough, flapping again. I contacted the local service tech (on speed dial now) and after his discussions with other Lucid service techs around the country, he suggested that water may have seeped into the door handle mechanism. I'm thinking that when water freezes in the door handle mechanism, it causes all sorts of chaos. In any case, they are going to replace the door handle with a mobile service visit but I'm thinking that there will probably be a broader recall to replace door handles at some point if they are not fully waterproof. Good news is that the service tech said that replacing door handles/mechanisms in the Gravity is very quick and easy, much more so than with the Air.
 
I've been developing some theories on what's happening as well.

For me, the behavior seems to be that there's something that's triggering the handle to unlock and present itself. That command, wherever it's coming from, is going directly to the door handle controller/handler, and causing the hardware to move. Then there's another check from the door handle, realizing that it should be locked (e.g., because the vehicle is moving, or in 2 cases now b/c the keyfob seems to be just at the edge of its range), runs a command to retract the handle b/c it shouldn't be unlocked. Rinse-and-repeat, this keeps on going as you drive.

I have a DE, and I recently got my second keyfob from a service appointment and I'm seeing this happen regularly w/ the newer keyfobs, but I haven't triggered it at all with the older one. I'll need more data to confirm the theory, but I can see where 3.3.20 tuned the antennas and the 3.3.9 firmware update made the keyfob more aggressive, to the point where it's triggering the unlock mechanism inadvertently.
 
To me, it seems like there is a switch that is failing to trigger -- when the door handle closes, there is a switch that is supposed to confirm that the handle is fully closed. When this switch doesn't trigger, it tries again to present and then hide the door handle, to get to that confirmed "closed" state. Just my guess on what's happening. it really could be a number of things.

I'm a career software guy, who in retirement has become an expert in pinball repair. As such, I am quite familiar with software solutions to hardware defects. Pinball is REPLETE with this practice!

I don't know anything about the Lucid Gravity platform, how centralized it is or how much control they even have over the door handle logic (it could be an embedded system from a contractor for all i know), but it seems like a simple check -- if the car is in drive, and the door handle has failed to successfully close itself X number of times, then issue the close command one last time and send a fault message somewhere. It makes absolutely no sense to allow an infinite loop of two states calling each other back and forth forever. There's no valid use case for that. This strikes me as a product of immature and poorly thought out code. Yes, fundamentally, it's a hardware problem, but it's one that should be mitigatable through good software design.

If i'm right (and I could be wrong), then what we're really seeing is the result of two failures at once - a switch failure and a software failure to recognize the switch failure.

pinball machines are generally pretty good at recognizing a stuck or broken switch, and have code built in to discount that switch's input when making future decisions. Lucid should be able to at least get on that level.
 
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Just saying ... I think it'd be nice if Lucid could at least get on the level, software-wise, as a pinball machine from 1993. I don't think that'd be an unreasonable goal.

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I noticed a difference between inside of the front and back door handles. I am not sure it has anything to do with flappy bird issue. It looks like something is missing in the front doors handles.
 

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pezpunk said:
To me, it seems like there is a switch that is failing to trigger -- when the door handle closes, there is a switch that is supposed to confirm that the handle is fully closed. When this switch doesn't trigger, it tries again to present and then hide the door handle, to get to that confirmed "closed" state. Just my guess on what's happening. it really could be a number of things.

I'm a career software guy, who in retirement has become an expert in pinball repair. As such, I am quite familiar with software solutions to hardware defects. Pinball is REPLETE with this practice!

I don't know anything about the Lucid Gravity platform, how centralized it is or how much control they even have over the door handle logic (it could be an embedded system from a contractor for all i know), but it seems like a simple check -- if the car is in drive, and the door handle has failed to successfully close itself X number of times, then issue the close command one last time and send a fault message somewhere. It makes absolutely no sense to allow an infinite loop of two states calling each other back and forth forever. There's no valid use case for that. This strikes me as a product of immature and poorly thought out code. Yes, fundamentally, it's a hardware problem, but it's one that should be mitigatable through good software design.

If i'm right (and I could be wrong), then what we're really seeing is the result of two failures at once - a switch failure and a software failure to recognize the switch failure.

pinball machines are generally pretty good at recognizing a stuck or broken switch, and have code built in to discount that switch's input when making future decisions. Lucid should be able to at least get on that level.
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Oh, definitely it should be fixable via software/firmware.

This is reminiscent of the charging bug that I started a thread on here a few months ago. Apparently the Gravity's hardware doesn't support in-car wakeup so it can start a scheduled charge, so the car sets an alarm to Lucid's servers to wake up the car at the appointed time and when it does it starts charging. Except, you can easily open your Lucid app and that also wakes the car up, and the car doesn't bother checking with the server and just assumes that it's been woken up to charge and therefore starts charging.

I'm a software guy too, and I suspect this is as simple as wrapping the handle handling code (ha!) in a conditional and as you say, maybe log it for posterity down the line.

I guess one thing, to give some grace to the Lucid team, is that cars are known to be complex, massively distributed systems where all the first- and third-party components communicate with each other in real-time, and often run into race conditions that are nondeterministic and hard to replicate. A ton of the alerts that kept on popping up in earlier versions of the car's firmware were of this variety: some hardware component didn't ping a healthcheck back fast enough, and the system naively interprets that as a component fault and alerts the driver to "call the service center." So the nature of the comms is a bit different than, say, a web app or a pinball machine…I think.
 
I got the software issue diagnosis as well but fortunately there was an error code stored - so they replaced it.
 
for what it's worth, after that one day where it did it on consecutive drives, it has not done it since. Someone who said it might be related to cold weather might be on to something - that was indeed the coldest day so far since i've had it.
 
I don’t think it has anything to do with cold weather. Mine is still doing it even though it’s 53 outside. When I don’t hear the opening and closing sound, it’s usually because it’s stuck in the open position.
 
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