You are placing the key in the area just under the front arm rest right? Not the top of the phone area but the bottom.
Yeah, but I tried it everywhere just for fun. This is clearly a failure in the access system because the card doesn't even work on the B-pillar NFC points.
Since I'm waiting for an update, I'll provide some more semi-informed speculation of what's happening. I've written about this here before, but a critical part of automotive manufacturing is how deep the supply chains are. Most car companies are primarily system integrators -- they pick the parts they want to put in the car, usually (but not always -- like the originally Tesla Roadster) manufacture the frame and body, do some customization and tuning on driver experience, and do sales and support. This is probably the highest risk role of the entire automotive supply chain because of all the capital-intensive investment and inventory management.
Lucid is a bit different (much like Tesla) in that they are actually designing and manufacturing the electric drive systems and at least some aspects of battery management directly, rather than getting them from other suppliers.... but they still participate in this supply chain heavily. You'd have to tear things down to see the labels on who is making what, but the seats are (custom) manufactured by Hyundai Transys (
https://www.hyundai-transys.com/en/product/seating/complete-seat.do), suspension components are from companies like Bilstein or Continental, and so forth.
Having taken the back off my key to reset it, I see that the entry and authorization system supplier is Marquardt (
https://www.marquardt.com/). They're another 100 year old German company that specializes in a few things -- switches, pumps, and entry/access control. You'd think that someone who does building access control would make vehicle access control systems and vice-versa, but these companies still remain very siloed by industry... I can't explain why, I suppose it's just historical. (My grandfather built a very successful business in Detroit manufacturing car window clips -- those bits that hold your window pane in place and attach to the motion mechanism. He later expanded to other parts, but that's how specialized these supply chains are.) Since Marquardt is the entry/access supplier, they're providing the key fobs, the key cards, the UWB transciever, the B-pillar and center console NFC readers, possibly a small microcontroller all those connect to, the software for it, and maybe a software library for the mobile app. When you are providing a capability, you're usually providing pretty much all of it.
I don't know what the E/E internals look like on the Gravity, so there are two possibilities -- Marquardt are providing mostly hardware, or a combination of hardware and software. Based on the historical background of the supplier, and that this is a security-related system, I'm going to guess this is still mostly hardware.... so there are the various sensors that connect to a small microcontroller (this is how you get to the "100+ computers in a modern vehicle" you may have read about) with its own software, connecting via a protocol like CAN bus to the main Nvidia-based main computer. The main computer can send and receive various requests to the access system, typically including software updates and resets -- and receives notification of successful key presentation. My guess is that the Marquardt MCU has gotten into an inconsistent state and is not being reset by the normal reboot process -- this would explain why the NFC points don't work either. In the end these are typically bugs in the supplied module, but often triggered by obscure race conditions in how messages are exchanged with the main computer... messages sent in the wrong order as per the documentation, messages too close together... these are embedded systems from traditionally hardware manufacturers, and their software process maturity may not be what you'd expect from a software-first company. That can make these problems really difficult to debug.
