Well, it was quite the day, Lucid-wise.
As I was leaving the grocery store this morning at 11:35 my phone rang. It was the Lucid Miami Worldcenter saying our new Gravity Dream Edition had arrived this morning and that if we could take delivery by the end of business hours at the Studio (7:00 p.m.) I would quality for a $2,000 incentive that expires today. I told them I hadn't even received a purchase agreement or invoice yet. (I had checked my Lucid account earlier this morning, and it showed the car still "In Production".) They said they would get the agreement and invoice sent to me shortly. I told them that I'd have to go to the bank to order a wire transfer but that it might not go through by end of day. They said that as long as I could bring the order from the bank for the transfer they would deliver the car without payment having actually been received.
So I raced home, scrapped dinner plans with friends, and started pulling things together. The paperwork from Lucid hadn't arrived by 1:00 p.m., so I jumped in the shower. The paperwork arrived by the time I got out. I was pleasantly surprised to see that, besides the $2,000 incentive, Lucid was also giving me a $3,000 "Studio Select Discount". I didn't think I qualified for that, as I had opted not to take one of several Gravity DEs that were in showrooms and instead took one that was still at the factory.
So I threw on some clothes and off we raced to the bank to order a wire transfer and then hit the road to Miami. We hit Miami right at rush hour but made it to the Service Center in time to sign everything, inspect the car, and set up the profiles which had to be done before they could take the car out of Service Mode. By about 7:10 things were wrapped up and the slightly irritated service personnel who were having to hang around after closing time could lock up and head home. (We left the new Gravity there to be trucked over to our PPF installer in the next few days.)
So, why am I posting this on the 3.3.20 update thread? Well, because we drove over to Miami in our first Gravity to which we had downloaded 3.3.20 three nights earlier . . . and the trip had its issues.
The morning after the update I took the car for a short drive to see how it behaved, and things seemed okay. I didn't put the car on a major highway where I could use the full DreamDrive suite, but the adaptive cruise control did work. Today we tried to engage DreamDrive once we got onto Alligator Alley (I-75 through the Everglades), and we found it was totally out of commission, including ACC which just threw up a "not available" flag.
We stopped along the way at our usual Tesla Supercharger stop for a quick top-up. I have a Tesla subscription for discount charging, so I logged in through the Tesla app, as usual. We plugged in, charging started . . . and about a minute later quit. We tried again. Same thing. So I killed the app and tried to use the Lucid plug-and-charge feature which had been working consistently before the 3.3.20 update. Same thing -- charge interrupted after a minute or so. We moved to another post that came open and finally got a charge to stick.
On the way back, since we had to stop for dinner anyway, we decided to do so at an Electrify America station just to see how that would go. It didn't for the first few tries. When I plugged in, the station didn't recognize that we were on the Lucid charging plan and asked me either to log in with an Electrify America account or use a credit card. It took several tries before the station finally recognized the car was in the Lucid plan. It finally started to initiate a charge, but then all the lights on the charge port turned to red and we got a connection malfunction error. That happened twice. Finally we got the charge started and rang up a whopping 90 kW charge speed -- even though the battery was preconditioned and the charge was below 60%. (Thank goodness it wasn't raining at either of these charge stops.)
We had been listening to Spotify on the drive over to Miami. On the return trip we tried to stream from Tidal but got nothing. I then tried the USB stick which had been working fine, but got a "media not available" message. So back to Spotify, which was still working.
As much as the Gravity software has plagued us from the start, the great saving grace was the seamless charging experience we were getting with the new NACS system. That grace has now disappeared in a puff of smoke, apparently a sacrifice to software gods or fixing some other software glitch.
I spent a good part of the trip home ruminating over the rush to take delivery of this new Gravity and wondering . . . "what have I done?" For tonight at least, I'm glad I left the thing behind at the Service Center for the time being, because having two cars on the road home with these shenanigans would have sent me over the edge.