Rutherford NJ Service Center

[TriumphToo]

Great owners club event at Rutherford NJ today. Gravity on full display, Q&A with staff, and a nice touch of giving us Bear logos for our cars. Well done all.

 

[moytoyx]

Here are a few shots from the ribbon cutting at the Rutherford, NJ service, studio and deliveries center. Great facility, lots of bays and pretty convenient to NYC and much closer for northern and central NJ folks versus KOP. Nice meeting new and old faces at event.

 

[CraZ8]

Who knew Whoopi was a fan? Her Star Trek costar Lavar Burton ( Geordi) also has an Air. I guess they both wanted a spaceship looking vehicle

 

[coma24]

Fun times at the opening of the new service center and studio in Rutherford. Very easy access, right off the service road from the highway. Not sure how they'll bring the foot traffic to the Studio, nobody will be casually driving by there, but my guess is it will be word of mouth and appointments rather than random foot traffic. Perhaps a presence at American Dream would be helpful to draw attention to the existence of the store with a Mini Studio at the mall?

This was a great event, the seating area and buffet in the service center provided plenty of opportunities to socialize with other owners.

The Q&A was good, although they were fairly tight lipped because of the upcoming earnings call. They were able to reveal that Android Auto is truly on track for Aug. A Lucid-branded NACS adapter is scheduled for around the same time, if memory serves. They couldn't say much about Drive Assist due to the earnings call but confirmed there's a large team working on it and will ALWAYS be working on it to provide continual improvements. They were cagey about features, but I could tell they wished they could say more...so I'm optimistic we'll see additional improvements. While answering a current Tesla owner's questions about software, they reminded us that the hardware in the Air and Gravity is considerably more advanced than Tesla, and that it's just a matter of building the software to take full advantage.

Lucid Assistant is receiving significant attention as the engineers dislike the current implementation along with the whole marketing team.

I spoke with Zach a little bit regarding software. It's non-trivial to have code bases to support each model, each trim level, each option and each version of deployed hardware, but they are making steps forward to a better-managed process for producing software builds for deployment. My guess is that things have been less than efficient in the past, but that they achieved some level of optimization/automation regarding their build process.

Lastly, don't plan on getting your car serviced at Rutherford any time soon...they only have a couple of qualified techs and despite having 10+ bays, they can't really handle more than 2 cars at a time at the moment as they simply don't have enough fully trained technicians. It's a very nice facility, and it's great to see a Service Center blended with a Studio, but they're going to need some time to ramp up. They've brought a couple of folks over from KOP and other facilities, but they're also hiring directly for the facility.
Those were my takeaways from the session.

 

[LucidNJ]

I missed out on the trip to Rutherford for the event due to my Air developing a parking brake fault and automatic hold fault the night before (terrible timing sheesh). Glad to know something will be opening relatively close by compared to KoP or Plainview for us central NJ folks. Part of me was wondering if they would just service my vehicle at the event to break it in . But alas, appointment in KoP tomorrow.