Lucid missing market segment begging to be exploited via Dream Drive

[victoryroad]

Yes, it would be nice to know what updates are ahead, but updates have been steady and have improved the overall Lucid experience for me. I am confident that Lucid is well aware of the preferences of owners. I find HA and the safety warnings sufficient to ease driving on long trips and to avoid problems on the interstates and secondary roads. I stay engaged and focused while driving and the safety assists are prudent, but my attention to driving.is more important. The AGT is a pleasure to drive and I enjoy the experience. Gravity may be preferable for some, but for now, I do not believe that there is a superior five-passenger car available.

 

[Buffalo Bob]

Yes, it would be nice to know what updates are ahead, but updates have been steady and have improved the overall Lucid experience for me. I am confident that Lucid is well aware of the preferences of owners. I find HA and the safety warnings sufficient to ease driving on long trips and to avoid problems on the interstates and secondary roads. I stay engaged and focused while driving and the safety assists are prudent, but my attention to driving.is more important. The AGT is a pleasure to drive and I enjoy the experience. Gravity may be preferable for some, but for now, I do not believe that there is a superior five-passenger car available.

I absolutely agree with you that being engaged and focused while driving is paramount, and I will drive that way even when higher levels of autonomy are available. That said, I find driving with Highway Assist turned on far more stressful than driving with it turned off. Lane centering is not quite where it needs to be yet (particularly on curves, poorly marked roads, and windy conditions), and even if it were, what I have to do to continually assure the car that my hands are on the wheel is just not worth the effort. I look forward to the day when I can just find a lane, set my speed, and pay attention with my hands at the ready.

 

[Batteryman]

FSD may not be the glorious robotaxi yet, but FSD 12.3.6 is truly remarkable in its current form and it is improving dramatically with each new iteration. Robotaxi is closer than you may realize.

Phantom braking, it also was driving straight for a train. You can’t achieve Robotaxis with just cameras. Good good example is a child on the side of the road. If there’s an adult holding the hand, you will not slow down, but if the child is playing with the ball or alone, you will. What do you do in bad weather with just cameras? Without redundancy, it’s unsafe and will make life threatening mistakes no matter how Musk spins it.

 

[3rdMotor]

Phantom braking, it also was driving straight for a train. You can’t achieve Robotaxis with just cameras. Good good example is a child on the side of the road. If there’s an adult holding the hand, you will not slow down, but if the child is playing with the ball or alone, you will. What do you do in bad weather with just cameras? Without redundancy, it’s unsafe and will make life threatening mistakes no matter how Musk spins it.

I don’t intend to get this thread off the rails. My opinion, as I’m a user of both, I love the Lucid Air, but the autonomous driving by Tesla is really head and shoulders above Lucid right now. I don’t care if it has 100 sensors or no sensors, FSD in its current form just works exceedingly well. I agree in that FSD is not perfect and Tesla has a way to go before a robotaxi is viable. We shall see what August brings.

Ultimately, I hope Lucid catches up to some degree but as others have said, DD Pro is probably not a big priority with the Gravity launch around the corner. Car manufacturers have a bad habit of over promising and under delivering on “coming soon” features, with Tesla being the worst offender and honestly Lucid being second worse (again, my opinion).

 

[Bobby]

I don’t intend to get this thread off the rails. My opinion, as I’m a user of both, I love the Lucid Air, but the autonomous driving by Tesla is really head and shoulders above Lucid right now. I don’t care if it has 100 sensors or no sensors, FSD in its current form just works exceedingly well. I agree in that FSD is not perfect and Tesla has a way to go before a robotaxi is viable. We shall see what August brings.

Ultimately, I hope Lucid catches up to some degree but as others have said, DD Pro is probably not a big priority with the Gravity launch around the corner. Car manufacturers have a bad habit of over promising and under delivering on “coming soon” features, with Tesla being the worst offender and honestly Lucid being second worse (again, my opinion).

I’ve said this on the forum many times: if there is a certain feature that is very important to you, make sure that feature is already in the vehicle you are buying. In this case, it sounds like you might have been better off with a Tesla. The fact that Tesla has more advanced FSD than Lucid is well known and has been posted here ad nauseam. For me personally, I don’t care because I like to drive the car. I never use HA.

 

[Batteryman]

I don’t intend to get this thread off the rails. My opinion, as I’m a user of both, I love the Lucid Air, but the autonomous driving by Tesla is really head and shoulders above Lucid right now. I don’t care if it has 100 sensors or no sensors, FSD in its current form just works exceedingly well. I agree in that FSD is not perfect and Tesla has a way to go before a robotaxi is viable. We shall see what August brings.

Ultimately, I hope Lucid catches up to some degree but as others have said, DD Pro is probably not a big priority with the Gravity launch around the corner. Car manufacturers have a bad habit of over promising and under delivering on “coming soon” features, with Tesla being the worst offender and honestly Lucid being second worse (again, my opinion).

For me, it’s all or nothing, either the car is a true Robotaxi, or I’ll drive myself. No middle ground where I’m holding the steering wheel or anticipating what the car will do.

Autonomous Robotaxi will take at least another 20-30 years to perfect if lucky. Realistically, half a century away, it these companies get there.

 

[Drendino]

I think that it’s fair game for early adopters to express disappointment in features that were promised but not (yet) delivered. Those who purchased later, expecting to have desired features added via OTA probably made a poor decision.

My father and I have identical GTs and are early adopters. He is in his 80s and I talked him into getting a GT because it incorporated Lidar and was slated to be the best/safest driver’s assistance available. Far better than Tesla, which at the time only used cameras. I never intended for it to drive for him, but if it offered him reliable driver’s assistance, my argument to him was that it would keep him on the road a little longer. The features that they showed at the time gave the impression that it was going to be very special. “Future ready” was really about level 3 features, but the reality is that going on 3 years, we don’t have level 2 comparable with much of the competition. My father is going to keep his GT, but after renting a Tesla MS with FSD while his GT was in the shop, he is now going to buy one because of the superior driver’s assistance.

We found out early on that Lucid does not communicate, so at this point I don’t believe that they will ever lay out their software road map. However, they have delivered many new features over the years without pre-announcing them, so I’m not giving up hope on new DD Pro features. My car is much more enjoyable to drive today than it was was when I first got it. I’m still having bugs and other problems, but Lucid has been excellent about addressing these issues. The longest I’ve owned a car over the last 20 years has been 3 years and I plan on keeping my GT for 10. I wouldn’t be thinking this way if I didn’t love the car.

I try to be fair to Lucid by giving them credit for the many areas where they have made improvements. However, I don’t think we do them any favors by making excuses for them where they come up short, like we see here so often. Lucid needs to be able to compete in a very difficult economy and advanced driver’s assistance is an important package to driver’s in this segment of the market. We should continue to hold them accountable to their original mission statement. If that mission changes, they owe it to customers to explain it, instead of making us guess.

 

[hydbob]

FSD may not be the glorious robotaxi yet, but FSD 12.3.6 is truly remarkable in its current form and it is improving dramatically with each new iteration. Robotaxi is closer than you may realize.

It exists. It's called Waymo/Cruise.

 

[Batteryman]

These autonomous cars not only need to be better than the average driver with regards to incidents of crashes, they need to be better than every person who uses it, otherwise there will be a percentage of people who would have survived if they didn’t use a Robotaxi. I consider myself a very safe and skilled driver, for me to put my life in the hands of a Robotaxi means it may never reach that mark in my lifetime.

 

[Adnillien]

It exists. It's called Waymo/Cruise.

Waymo and Cruise are only level 4 but they are robotaxis in the areas and conditions that they operate.

 

[xponents]

It exists. It's called Waymo/Cruise.

The East coast: Am I a joke to you?

 

[Buffalo Bob]

It exists. It's called Waymo/Cruise.

Waymo is truly amazing. I live in Tempe, where interacting with these vehicles happens every day, and I have come to the point of actually seeking them out when I have a choice. Get behind one at a traffic light. When the light turns green, it moves right away. What? Not finishing that text? On the road, it travels dead center in the lane. What? Not looking elsewhere or reading an email and drifting all over the place? It's fast, dead nuts accurate, signals turns, doesn't run lights, and is reliable as hell. Now, throw it a curve, like a non functioning left turn lane sensor, and it will sit there ad nauseum, but I can live with that. It won't shoot me in a fit of rage either.

I think the world will be a better place, and accident/insurance rates should drop dramatically, when many drivers have access to at least some of this technology. I hope that, rather than having so many auto makers reinvent the wheel, something like Waymo technology will be easily accessible (and adaptable) for use by companies like Lucid.

Oops, I just remembered that Waymo is owned by Google, like Android Auto. Never mind.

Oh wow. The light changed about ten minutes ago. I better move. Thank God everybody in Arizona is afraid to even honk at laggards like me!

 

[hmp10]

There's a lot to unpack with ADAS claims, no matter who is making them. Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson gave several interviews before the Air started deliveries warning that autonomous driving beyond Level 2 was going to come slower than many were saying and that getting beyond Level 3 was going to take at least 10 years and many billions of development dollars. On the other hand, since there was no clear consensus at the time (or even now) among the experts in the field on just what the technology answers would become on either the hardware or software fronts, Lucid was going to future-proof itself insofar as possible with Dream Drive Pro. At the time, the debate was heating up about whether advanced ADAS could be done only with cameras or whether sonar, radar, lidar, or even the FLIR used in military aircraft should be part of the sensor suite. Therefore, except for FLIR, Lucid opted with Dream Drive Pro to install all the hardware necessary to pursue whichever path to higher-level ADAS emerged as the most promising on the hardware front as well as the processing power to utilize the data.

At the same time, Rawlinson was careful not to set forth any hard and fast timelines for getting to any given level of ADAS. He was also careful to avoid promising even reaching Level 3 with Dream Drive Pro at all, much less Level 4 or 5, suggesting at the most Level 2+ as Lucid's goal.

I understand how disappointingly slow progress has been with ADAS in Lucids. Now there are signs that Lucid may even be bringing Korea's HL Mando on board for ADAS partnership (and possibly away from HERE, which has provided mapping data?). So I'm sure Lucid is still moving in this arena. But it may well be that Rawlinson's earlier prognostications about what a realistic timeline might be is, in fact, the case.

I know how some Tesla drivers are waxing euphoric about how near true self-driving is for Tesla right now. (My brother is one, but one who, tellingly, did not take Tesla up on its recent 30-day trail period even though he paid for FSD in his car at purchase.) But I can roll the tape and find the same confidence in FSD's imminent arrival three, four, five years ago.

 

[BS8899]

Waymo is truly amazing. I live in Tempe, where interacting with these vehicles happens every day, and I have come to the point of actually seeking them out when I have a choice. Get behind one at a traffic light. When the light turns green, it moves right away. What? Not finishing that text? On the road, it travels dead center in the lane. What? Not looking elsewhere or reading an email and drifting all over the place? It's fast, dead nuts accurate, signals turns, doesn't run lights, and is reliable as hell. Now, throw it a curve, like a non functioning left turn lane sensor, and it will sit there ad nauseum, but I can live with that. It won't shoot me in a fit of rage either.

I think the world will be a better place, and accident/insurance rates should drop dramatically, when many drivers have access to at least some of this technology. I hope that, rather than having so many auto makers reinvent the wheel, something like Waymo technology will be easily accessible (and adaptable) for use by companies like Lucid.

Oops, I just remembered that Waymo is owned by Google, like Android Auto. Never mind.

Oh wow. The light changed about ten minutes ago. I better move. Thank God everybody in Arizona is afraid to even honk at laggards like me!

Waymo shows us the right way to do "self-drive/robo-taxi". Tesla screwed around with LIDAR for a while, bad-mouthed LIDAR, and (according to some reports) relooked at it again. Waymo has "scanning 3D LIDAR". Scanning Lidar enables the measurement of dimensions and depth accurately, much more accurately than cameras. Don't think the Lucid LIDAR is of the same capability.

Elon Musk's "thesis" is that Tesla has cameras, which are the equivalent of human eyes, thus cameras should be sufficient for FSD. However, even for human eyes, it requires a "stereo camera" (aka two eyes) and there is a BRAIN to process the information for depth and judgment. In my humble opinion. that's a lot more optical and processing power than what the current Tesla FSD has.

In short, I think, FSD in the instantiation of Waymo can work. I have a hard time seeing the same results for the current Tesla architecture. I have no idea what Lucid uses its LIDAR for, except as advertising. I though Lucid's LIDAR is supposed to be a key part of DDPRO. But I have no idea what it is being used for!

 

[hmp10]

I though Lucid's LIDAR is supposed to be a key part of DDPRO. But I have no idea what it is being used for!

I'm not sure of the source, but I've read that Lucid currently runs LIDAR redundantly in parallel with other sensors to fill in data gaps from those other sensors.

 

[hydbob]

I'm not sure of the source, but I've read that Lucid currently runs LIDAR redundantly in parallel with other sensors to fill in data gaps from those other sensors.

This is correct, as confirmed my Lucid's ADAS engineers.

 

[xponents]

This is correct, as confirmed my Lucid's ADAS engineers.

Is there potential for it to be used for things other than just filling in the gaps (in case they add Level 3)?

 

[BS8899]

I'm not sure of the source, but I've read that Lucid currently runs LIDAR redundantly in parallel with other sensors to fill in data gaps from those other sensors.

Exactly, I think that means they are using Lidar as a camera "augmentation". I don't see what unique function LIDAR is enabling on the Lucid.

 

[hydbob]

Is there potential for it to be used for things other than just filling in the gaps (in case they add Level 3)?

Probably Highway Pilot

 

[BS8899]

Exactly, I think that means they are using Lidar as a camera "augmentation". I don't see what unique function LIDAR is enabling on the Lucid.

I am not a LIDAR expert by any stretch of the imagination. From what I know, I question whether a passive (non-scanning) LIDAR can offer any useful extension to the cameras.

someone who is a lot smarter than I am can educate us.