EP27: Lucid Gravity: Hipster Hotrod Minivan

Jon Summers is the Motoring Historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider. On his show he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, motoring travel.

Notes

Samuel Sonder ft. Luke Coulson – I Can Feel You
Lucid Gravity
Western Automotive Journalists
The 500 hp motor which fits in a suitcase
The rolling chassis
Parallels with Duesenberg
Gravity Front
Scandroid – Neo Tokyo
Moving Motorcycles in Minivans. But not this one. Trunk aperture too small.
EV driving experience lacks marque-specific character. Except perhaps Lucid
Car buying is about image, not capability
Can an SUV be “sporty”?
“Compromise Nothing”, a doubtful tagline
Minivan/Flex shape better than Bentayga/Rangey shape
Range Anxiety removing 400+mile range
The Wunderbox To power your house in an outage
200 miles range on a 15 min charge
Gateway Drugs – Give me your Love
The California Bear Logo and California design
The Importance of the Interior. Which is very nice.
Moonroof feels like T-tops
Safety sh1t
.24 drag coefficient
Apple-copy design elements eww
Augmented Reality Heads Up Display. Which seemed subtle and useful
Relaxation mode. With Meditopia
The car as living room
900 volts, and the Tesla Cybertruck crash
Starcadian – Heart

Transcript

[00:00:00] John Summers is the motoring historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider. Hailing from California, he collects cars and bikes built with plenty of cheap and fast, and not much reliable. On his show, he gets together with various co hosts to talk about new and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.

Good day, good morning, good afternoon. It’s John Summers. Welcome to the motoring historian. So this episode is devoted to the lucid gravity. I went to the launch at the plant down in Newark in the. East Bay of San [00:01:00] Francisco Bay Area. Yes, I did, Arthur. Yeah, I went down there and I looked at it. Yeah. And I’ve not walked the dog before I tried to record this.

So of course I’m being interrupted by my K9 companion here always.

So, as ever, I was invited to this new car event by the Western Automotive Journalists. Yeah, I want to thank Michael Coates and the folk at WAG for organizing the event, as ever. Um, and thank the folk at Lucid for inviting me. And, you know, there’s almost a contradiction at work here, because, uh, I really appreciate being invited to these kind of events and I really enjoy driving the cars and, and, you know, I drove around the fact I arrived earlier and I drove around the factory earlier and I can see that the people who work in the factory, you know, there are, there are E39 5 series and there was an E55 like.

Mine in there, like my old one, like a [00:02:00] w two 10, like 2000 model to, you know, 25 year old, he 55 in the car park there as well. And, and, you know, you’re very conscious that I’m sorry, I’m having a tug of war with a dog. That’s why it feels as if I’m like, sounds as if I’m like strained or something peculiar here.

Um, cause I am straining. I’m like having a tug of war with the dog at the, uh, at the same time here on his, on this rope affair thing that he’s, uh, that he’s got. Yeah. Yeah, so I’m, I’m very grateful to go down there and look at what they have. And I can tell that the engineers and the people there, they’re like car people.

So I really want to like what there is that they, that they’re produced and what the, what it is that they produce. And I also recognize that modern car design, you know, the days where you could. Throw caution to the wind and pen a Jaguar XKE or a, you know, 67 Mustang. I recognize that those days are largely gone.[00:03:00]

So I recognize that. And, you know, I’ve driven Lucid Airs before. And if you’ve listened to any of my pods before, you know that I like the, you know, I like the product. The product is that they’re good to drive. Um, What’s my hesitation? Well, because I always want to be cynical about it because, um, awesome as they are, they’re just not gritty enough.

You know, EVs just aren’t gritty enough for John Summers, and they’re not gritty enough. They just don’t feel like real cars. They, you know, fast as they are, they just Don’t feel like, like real cars, but, but look, um, I want to park that with my, uh, excitement about, you know, going to this awesome modern factory at the, in the heart of the Bay area and, and really listening to the, um, listening to the blurb at the very sort of highest, highest level from its, uh, from its source and, and, You know, fundamentally, what lucid talk about is [00:04:00] California luxury.

And what do they mean by that? They mean that the EV was a chance to redefine what it is to be luxurious. And they’ve chosen to define that in a very California way because they’re a California company. company and you want to say, but aren’t they funded by the Saudi government? And the answer is yes, they are.

And that means that it doesn’t matter that the, you know, the Chinese are going to come and, you know, take swathes out of market share and, you know, making EVs is going to be a losing proposition probably for the next 10 years. If you don’t live in China, uh, you know, that’s not a problem for lucid.

They’re, they’re going to be around. That’s what. Yeah, this is what the reps are telling us, you know, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, won’t it? But I certainly get the sense that they’re not going anywhere and the commitment to design excellence is really obvious. So right when you walk in reception, there’s one of their, um, Electric motors, and this is like 500 horsepower, and it’s like, you know, [00:05:00] it looks like it well, it would fit inside a wheel.

It’s it’s like it looks like it’s a washing machine motor. I mean, absolutely incredible technology. And that is the feature of lucid is that if you Um, the exterior is nice, nice, contemporary, practical design, um, feels like you’ve walked into restoration hardware. You know, that’s the, the sort of thing that they’re trying to do.

And, and I think they’re successful in, you know, it feels like California luxury, like relaxed and cool and practical and high tech and, and all of that, which is their goal there. They’ve succeeded. They’ve very much succeeded in that, but. Under the skin, the technology under the skin is just absolutely, you know, better than everybody else’s fundamentally.

And they’re not shy to do that. They’re not shy to talk about that. The motors there in reception, they’ve got, you know, the monocoque that the dream that the, [00:06:00] um, the dream that the air is based on, you know, the sedan, the steel sedan body, they’ve got one of those. Um, they’ve also got In the actual demonstration area that we went in where we had like a, you know, pizza and listen to the design dude talk.

There was also a, uh, a cutaway. Um, well, I say cutaway. It was basically, it was the car without a body. You call it a rolling chassis. I’ve got to say, right, this is, I, and now I’m talking about the rolling chassis. I’ve had this thought again, so I’m going to say it again because it, it, it deserves that. The.

glorying of motor, the glorying of the body in steel. This felt like Fred and Augie Duesenberg. I’ve got to be honest. It feels like a Fred and Augie Duesenberg kind of thing. So, you know, so clearly I’m all about lucid and, and, and no, no, you know, [00:07:00] I’ve drunk the Kool Aid. I do like what they stand for, but this gravity, they’re calling it an SUV.

And, you know, from the rear, it has this lovely kind of shooting break thing going on. And the dude talks a lot about the arrow, but from the front and you have to be the judge here, but from the front, isn’t it a little bit Chrysler minivan? Like, I mean, I, I didn’t have the heart to say that to anybody when I was there, but, but now I’m on the pod like, Ooh, it is a bit, it is a bit Chrysler minivan, but is that a bad thing?

You know, it’s also, it’s, you know, it’s, you know, it’s that hearse shape, isn’t it? Like the Ford edge. I personally thought the Ford edge was a great product and I spend idle time sometimes surfing EcoBoost versions of those Ford edges. Cause that’s a, you know, that’s a very high power, high torque motor in a really practical, completely unobtrusive package in the case of the, uh, of the twin turbo, um, Ford.

What was it? [00:08:00] Was it the edge? It wasn’t the edge. It was the long Hersey one. What the devil was it called? Can’t remember. I might interrupt myself to, uh, to, to, to put it in. Um, it was the Ford flex. That was the Hersey one, the Ford flex, and you can get it with the 3. 5 liter, liter EcoBoost. So that tweaked or not is pretty meaningful.

Anyway, whatever. It has that kind of Hersey body style, big wheels, which, you know, you can say what you like about big, big wheels. Are they to my taste? You know, I’m not always, I guess I’m getting used to them, but, you know, they’ve only been around for 15 or 20 years, haven’t they, you old bastard. But look, right, the wheels seem a little big to me, but you know, that is what we do nowadays.

And overall, I like the proportions of it. And the model that they had, which Was in, uh, was in this nice green. They do six colors. They were telling us and, and, you know, the model that they had was in this nice green, which, [00:09:00] uh, which, which I liked. So the plant, um, I mean, the note that I made was that it’s smaller than Halewood or the whole small on Halewood was when, when I used to go to a dodgy car auction, just behind, uh, just behind the Halewood plant there.

Um, when, uh, when I lived in that area, it’s, you know, bloody 35 years ago. Um, But, uh, but look, right? Um, feels more like a tech campus than a car factory. Maybe they don’t make the cars there. Maybe that’s just the design thing, but it feels like it’s a tech campus. And if you, you know, if you know the Bay Area at all, it’s in it’s in Newark, which is the East Bay, and it’s right off the end of the Dumbarton Bridge.

So there’s a number of bridges across the Bay, the sort of the You know, the Golden Gate up at the top, going north, south, and then going east out of San Francisco, the Bay Bridge, then there’s [00:10:00] the Richmond, and then there’s the San Mateo Bridge. And then the next one down there is the Dumbarton Bridge, and that’s the one that that Newark, uh, uh, right by.

So it’s, uh, you know, and, uh, yeah, it’s like, you know, industrial estate y, nice y, industrial estate y, but, you know. Yawn, basically characters yawn.

So as I say, I really, I, uh, the car was parked up with its tail to us when we walked in, when you walked into like the reception area and, and, uh, the note that I made was I thought the rear was cool and, and it is, it’s like a shooting breakie kind of shape because it has this giant. Spoiler on on the top of it to really, you know, create that long tail and improve the the arrow, which was something that the guy talked about, um, a lot.

In fact, he talked about it so [00:11:00] much that I felt the need to repeat myself about it. Um, now I did find myself prattling with, uh, with another one of the journalists, Western automotive journalist members, um, About, uh, the fact that I met a guy that, you know, the shape is fundamentally minivan and we were talking about minivans and we were saying how versatile they are and how you can’t say, you can’t say minivan.

You have to say SUV, even if you’re going to make it kind of minivan. Um, And I was telling him about a bloke who I knew was curator of that motorcycle museum in Iowa that closed quite recently. And he told me he used his own personal car often to move, um, motorcycles from the collection around. And, and that was a 2002 Honda Odyssey minivan.

And. You know, his point when I was wondered how you could like actually get the thing chopped up properly. But I guess with, with lighter bikes, older, lighter bikes, he was, well, anyway, he felt, [00:12:00] um, you know, that was all you needed to move motorcycles. Do you need a pickup truck? Yeah. Honda Odyssey would, uh, would, would do a job.

And, and what did that have to do with the lucid gravity? Simply that. There are all these pictures of, you know, the different configurations of the interior, all of which looked rather like my buddies because they had bikes and surfboards and baby carriages and all this kind of thing. And they’re all reminded me of of this bloke explaining to me how he could get his family and a motorcycle in the minivan kind of thing.

Anyway, right for all that, the whole was small. The aperture was small. It’s got one of these powered trunks and the long and short is, is that the powering and by the time they put, you know, the lights in, even when the trunks open, they’ve got tail lights. So, you know, all of that stuff, by the time they’ve done all of that, I’m telling you, dude, the whole is not big for getting stuff in.

There’s no [00:13:00] way you get a motorcycle. It, that was, uh, that was the point about the digression about the Odyssey and the Honda. The Honda mini, the Honda minivan being, uh, guess what? A Honda minivan is more practical than a hundred grand Lucid. So when we looked at it wasn’t a hundred grand, it was 90. Um, Yeah, and you know, it felt like a 90 grand car.

Is it, you know, was it if I compare it with, um, a Range Rover that I drove recently or a Lexus like GX that was in the seventies. Um, you know, the range he was more than 100. Was it as nice as that? No. Was it nicer than the 70 grand Lexus? Yes, it most certainly was with the with the, uh, design aesthetic that you’re familiar with from the air, if you’ve looked at the air.

So if you’re thinking about buying a gravity, the experience visually is very similar to the I didn’t drive one. Apparently some more privileged journalists had done earlier in the day. But like [00:14:00] these electric things, you know, I never thought I would say this is journalist, but they do all seem to drive the same.

The differentiation which once existed between, you know, the way one Mark and another Mark drove, or the way a sort of family car drove versus a city car versus a luxury car. All of those things have blurred, you know, completely. And, uh, you know, the, In, you know, in a recent test I conducted, obviously not on the public highway, um, I, I drove a number of electric cars and, you know, even the Fiat 500 could do more than 90 miles an hour, which seemed to me perfectly adequate for most of the people, most of the time, right?

That, and it gets there in the way that electric cars do, like, right there. So, so it seems to me that, that, Um, I’ve fallen down a rat hole and don’t really know what I’m talking about.[00:15:00]

Yeah. So whilst I like the rear, I do think the front is rather Chrysler Pacifica and I may even include pictures to do like a comparison or whatever Chrysler are calling their minivan at the moment. I also drove, um, a Kia Carnival. Is it the Kia minivan recently? And that had similar kind of like. Big wheel, high nose frontage.

So, you know, now you may remember, and this probably got lost in, in a pod that I did some time ago, and I can’t even remember the name of, of the maker that did this, but there was some, um, Evie maker who were talking about how. The car that they were doing was going to be everything. It was going to be like super car performance as well as, you know, minivan space, as well as Mercedes S class luxury.

It was going to be all of those things. And it’s a [00:16:00] bit like guy, like, look, the, I just said that the performance of all cars are similar, right? So why doesn’t everybody buy a Fiat 500? Well, because people don’t like the image. Those people that buy F 250s, Brodos or F 250s, new F 250s, do they really need the heavy duty towing and off road capacity of an F 250 versus an F 150?

No, they just need to be able to piss higher up the wall in the mall or the bar or the, I don’t know, wherever those people go to peacock. They just need to Peacock more effectively than, you know, the other guy, that’s the point of, uh, of, of those kind of vehicles. So, so look, I, I get the, um, so, so what I’m saying is that we buy vehicles based upon the image rather than what they really are, you know, [00:17:00] People buy a Lamborghini to say I’m successful in swaggering, not because they think what’s the best way for me to do 150 miles an hour, or, you know, they, they, it’s a different thing.

The 150 miles an hour is just a by product of the showiness and the statement of, of owning a Lamborghini. So what we’re saying is the, however fast an SUV is, if even if you call it, however fast a minivan is, even if you call it an SUV. If it looks like an SUV or a minivan, people are going to struggle with the notion of it being sporty.

Now, the presentation yesterday, they went to some lengths to demonstrate how there are sporty SUVs. They talked about the Urus and the Audi e tron and, you know, and I’m not going to deny, you know, I spent some time last week with, uh, a Porsche, Yes. And, and, you know, that is, [00:18:00] they are, it is an SUV and it is sporting at the same time, and that is a contradiction in terms.

So I’m not saying that I don’t think the lucid gravity is going to be, have any sporting, you know, genes in it’s, you know, I’m just saying that. When I hear Compromise Nothing and how this is like a Range Rover and a Bronco and an S Class and, you know, uh, Mercedes SL all combined together, it’s not that I don’t, it’s not that I think it’s bullshit, it’s just that I don’t think Compromise Nothing is good enough.

Consumers are going to buy it. Consumers buy an image, and if it looks like a minivan, they aren’t going to buy it because they don’t want a minivan. Um, does this look like a minivan? No. As I say, it’s just, you know, it’s just suspiciously, what am I trying to say? I like Lucid. I like what they’re trying to do.

What other shape were they meant to do? Do they want to do? Far better to [00:19:00] do a Porsche Panamera Taycan with like some off road pretension. Far better to do that than, you know, yeah, yeah. Far better to do that than a Bentayga, right? When it’s not Bentayga proportions. So maybe I should be grateful that they’ve not done, gone full sort of Chelsea tractor, but you know, you just.

Just the whole compromise. Nothing is just I struggle. I mean, it’s marketing fluff, isn’t it? And I’m old and cynical, and I’m never going to spend 90 grand on a electric anything, let alone electric lucid. So, you know, and you probably you’re not you. You’re probably listening to this, you know, try to make buying decisions, not worrying what my silly opinion is.

So let me let me move on. You see, up to now, I’m not going to move on, I’m going to dwell on this, because I’m just reading my notes here, up to now, this is what they said in the presentation, up to now, you had to compromise, the [00:20:00] Suburban gave you space, but was bad to drive, the Urus was good to drive, but it couldn’t tow, and you know, it was no good for picking up your in laws from the airport, the Gravity is the best of all of these.

Now, he talked as well about how he’s been, I’ve been sweating over the aero, but I think I’ve said that about three times before, so maybe I need to edit myself, uh, edit myself here. Um, so he, he described it as spacious and sporty. Normally these would be like, you know, oxymoronic, but he’s saying in this not spacious and sporty, efficient and powerful, high tech and human centered, you know, so is it all in the drop down?

No, you’ve got some buttons and there’s some nice wood, but you know, it’s still like high tech, capable and sophisticated. Capable is like, you know, the graphic was of a bronco for that, you know, it was like, you know, capable means can actually go off road, you know, um, [00:21:00] The tech stuff, right? Um, 40 percent more interior space than the equivalent like Mercedes EQS SUV.

They’re not committing to a range yet, but like, the blurb said 450. They were The rep was talking about 440, but didn’t want to like hang his hat on it. And, uh, what I actually wrote down was 400 miles plus, because that was the original, like parameters. So look, they’ve done, they’ve done their like removal of, of range anxiety.

And, and, you know, well, where I was sitting just like next to me. I’m going to add a photo of this. There was a photo of like the Wunderbox or something like that, camera, what it was called. Anyway, basically, this device allows you that if there’s a power cut, you can draw electricity from the car’s battery to the house.[00:22:00]

Now, one of the things that we were talking about in the questions afterwards was just how exciting that is in terms of a flexible electricity grid in terms of needing to generate less electricity. If you imagine a city of the future where houses. And cars together are able to, you know, where a power station is able to save electricity in the cars that people have got sitting in their driveways attached to the electricity grid charging or indeed returning electricity.

Um, you know, in times of peak need. So, you know, when everyone’s home watching the Super Bowl, you know, at halftime when everyone puts the kettle on for a cup of coffee in the World Cup final, you know, that in that moment for that kind of peak jump demand, you could do something like draw a little bit of [00:23:00] power from the car because, you know, everyone knows that you’re not going to be going out and driving and the car can be, you know, that was the, the kind of, of, you know, Uh, utopian notion that they were developing.

Obviously I added in the bit about the cup of tea in the middle of, uh, of halftime of the football and all of that. But you’ve, you’ve got that. That was the sense of the kind of scenario they were going at. So look, um, 400 mile range, 15 minutes to charge. 200 miles of range, which is two minutes faster than a Tesla Model X.

And, and I know spiritually people aren’t going to deal with the range anxiety, but like in the real world, if you are doing a road trip, if you can pull up to a gas station and whilst the car’s gassing up, everyone hops out, takes a piss, buy some food, by the time you’ve got back in the car, if you’re not, you’ve spent 15 minutes, haven’t you?

You know, you’ve, you’ve already, and that’s given another 200 miles. So, [00:24:00] you know, I, I feel like we’re moving to a realm where people’s range anxiety fears are not valid. And I say that as, uh, as, you know, for now, obviously in, in place, there has to be a charging infrastructure. There is no good, you know, trying to drive, you know, drive from London to Manchester, London to Edinburgh, you know, one, uh, and I, in a.

You know, on a, on a holiday when there’s going to be loads of other people in line at the charges kind of thing, I’m just saying that the technology, it really feels like the technology is, is getting there and in terms of, you know, the territorial pissing between manufacturers, that 15 minutes to add 200 miles of range is two minutes faster than Tesla Model X is, uh, is, is able to do.[00:25:00]

The California bear, the state bear, the grizzly bear, which has been extinct in California for hundreds of years now. But, um, you know, the California bear logo, which you’re familiar with, and you do see quite a lot around California. If you live here, um, the bear logo, um, appears are in 13 places or something they said around the car.

Um, and. Um, you know, the bear was a sort of lodestone for them in terms of positioning the branding. So is it their logo? No, that’s the company’s name, but it’s a sort of, you know, it because it within the bear, we symbolize California and within California, we have sustainability, we have, um, evolution, we have art, we have, um, Well, some other stuff I wrote down there, whatever, you know, all this touchy feely stuff [00:26:00] about California, which they use to inform their design, but there is a hard element to this, right?

And the hard element is simply that when you drive a BMW or a Mercedes or an Audi, they feel a certain way. And what they want to do is imbue a certain Californian ness way of feeling into Lucid. And look, right, that’s Is how you, you’re going to build brand value in, in future. I’m trying to say that, yes, there’s going to be a race to the bottom in terms of, of price and quality for amongst many EVs and many of those vehicles are not going to have any character and there’s going to be room for a luxury product that has a little bit of character and Lucid seem to be doing, um, seem to be taking the notion of brand value.

building those kind of brand values very seriously. And, and, you know, in that we might compare them with Lucid or more recently Genesis. [00:27:00] Lexus and Genesis before, you know, we might think about, um, you know, somebody like Tesla, you know, Tesla, there’s not a, um, even the premium Teslas have a sort of, um, Apple aesthetic in terms of an austerity about the design.

The. interior of the gravity does not have an austerity about it and I should have talked about the interior earlier right because they started in the presentation by talking about what it was like on the inside and there’s me being like but minivan from the outside but maybe that’s a bit silly of me because inside, um, I mean the old car was defined by the moonroof, right?

The air is defined by the moonroof. This guy [00:28:00] has A similar moonroof effect, but on this occasion, this really made me laugh. My son and I were chuckling about this, that the, um, it has a big windshield and then it has a bar that comes between the driver and the passenger in the front. And then in the, then, uh, at the back, it has, uh, an open piece of glass in, uh, in, in, in the backseat.

So, um, I’m not explaining that very well, but if I tell you that sitting in, it feels like sitting in like a Nissan 300 ZX or a Camaro or some kind of. Eighties car with T tops, you know, those removable pieces of glass, but where there was still a bar that connected the top of the windshield with the, the, you know, the back of the, of the roof that it has that it has that going on.

So anyway, really open and the posts themselves, the pillars themselves, uh, were in the model that we [00:29:00] sat in were Alcantara. I’m telling you. Awesome place to be. Um, and the whoosh of the electric combined with the airiness is, is really incredible. One of the things that I, so one of the, uh, my, I suppose one of the other WADGE members had some really I mean, just was obsessed by safety, right?

Let’s let’s say that and it was a bit of a eye roll for me, candidly, but looking back her drilling into the safety had the guys talking about how the glass was laminated, how there was a layer of gel in it, how, you know, They worked very hard to make sure that the glass isn’t going to collapse inside the cabin, even in the event of a rollover.

So, you know, I guess I hadn’t, you know, I never think about what would happen in the event of a crash. I’m just like, Oh, that’s nice and airy. But, you know, So it is nice and [00:30:00] airy, but that’s how they’ve, uh, but it’s all safety as well. 0. 24 drag factor, which is kind of incredible, isn’t it? Um, I mean, it makes you realize how incredible the Audi 100 was to be doing 0.

29 in like, you know, one second. 1984 or 82, or whatever it was, but, uh, but, but yeah, and he, and, and, you know, I’m not going to dwell on the fact that the bloke who presented to us was heavily involved in that aero thing, but he, uh, in a presentation, he talked a little bit about how, you know, you know, you want to like a smooth tail, you know, he compared a speedboat and a canoe in terms of the kind of, uh, Of tail that you, uh, that you wanted to, to, to create.

Um, he described a proud front end, which emphasized the width of the vehicle. He described the interior as being, as having mid [00:31:00] century inspired luxury. The interior trims, uh, are named after like bits of California like Mojave or Ojai or Tahoe. Oh yeah, this is an interesting thing he was talking about.

Um, so I guess, uh, there’s like the tablet screen, then there’s the screen that has the speakers. Speedo and I don’t know, battery charge or whatever. And then there’s the steering wheel, right? And, and they’d noticed that with the air that you, you obviously, you spent a lot of time toggling from the road and then, you know, looking at the road and then looking at one of the screens and looking at the road and looking at the screen.

So what they’d done was they’d moved the positions of the screens more up into your eye line and the steering wheel down a little bit. So you needed. So you would be toggling in a different way, which is, you know, natural, right? This is more of a minivan driving position rather than a, you know, fat old Mercedes or BMW driving position, which is what you get in the air.[00:32:00]

The sedan. Oh, I thought this was interesting. So on the steering wheel, there’s, uh, um, a mouse and, and the design guy described the mouse as similar to an Apple remote. And I’m like, Oh. Yeah. Okay. Cause it always makes me just, I don’t like Apple design. So whenever I hear anybody referencing straight ahead, copying Apple design, especially in automotive design, it just really it’s fingernails down a blackboard for me, they made quite a big song and dance about.

The heads up display. Um, they showed film of it and and it’s it’s very subtle. Um, it’s not one of these like in your face heads up. Um, particularly it’s I mean, it’s augmented reality. So it’s we’re not just talking about the speed. Oh, it’s also augmented reality around showing [00:33:00] you where the lanes are. So if it’s foggy, you know, the car knows where the road is.

So it depicts that. on the heads up display for you to do that. And, and, uh, um, they’re making a big song and dance about that. You know, how really, how useful that is. You know, I don’t, I don’t even know, you know, I guess, you know, if you, uh, you know, it’s foggy in the Bay Area and, and, you know, so there is definitely, uh, an, an application for that and it would provide, uh, uh, a level of.

of confidence that, you know, I mean, yeah, it is what it is. Augmented reality, heads up display. And that user AI, AI, that automotive user interface conference I went to, um, I did the keynote for a couple of months ago. Um, there were some people, uh, there was talk of creating, uh, [00:34:00] a relaxation mode that you could put the car in where the car would like help you relax.

And it went through a couple of scenarios and you might remember that I was not. Completely cynical about it, but it all had the feel of like a half baked student project that was trying to solve a need that didn’t really exist. And, you know, couldn’t you just like, you know, recline the seat and, you know, put on some of your favorite music and wouldn’t achieve the same effect kind of thing.

But, um, apparently lucid, um, have actually come to market with something that looked like what was being, you know, talked about in that, um, at the conference, which is that they’ve, that they want to make the interior of the car more like a sanctuary. They, they have, and they partnered with this company, Meditopia, um, so that you can do like breathing exercises and all this kind of thing in, in, in the car.

It’s just weird to me because I [00:35:00] mean, I hang out in the car and relax, you know, I’ve long felt like, you know, I, I, I’ve long from the time that I was a sales rep, I’ve, you know, sat all from the time that I was a teenager and, you know, first had a car, the car you, you know, it was nice to have a car that you could sit in where, you know, you had something to eat, you could hang out with friends with friends chatting, you know, it was, you know, I, I always felt like the car It was never just, um, you never just used it to get from A to B.

It always was kind of, of a living room for you as well. And of course, Americans are very familiar with that, with that kind of idea. Um, so the notion of like the car being a sanctuary and you know, all of that, I guess I, I, I really understand, but then the notion of it being like, you know, all yoga and all of that, I just.

That is just completely, um, alien to me, completely, uh, alien. The electrical system on it is [00:36:00] 900 volts and, you know, I know if somebody came to you now and said, yes, so what we’re going to do is we’re going to run this gas line right by that exhaust and you’re going to be like, well, isn’t there a fire risk there?

Like, what if the fuel line splits? But if you look under the hood of most cars from the 60s and 70s, the fuel line runs right past the hot exhaust, especially, you know, American V8s, it does, right? And, and, you know, there were fires, but not lots of fires. Right. So, um, it might seem a bit alarmist to be like 900 volts aren’t people going to get like electrocuted and die.

Aren’t they going to be terrible fires? Like as these things get old. Um, I mean, and this is, we’re coming on the back of, of, uh, of an accident in California, um, where some teenagers. Uh, uh, wrecked a Tesla Cybertruck. If [00:37:00] you look at all the news reports, it’s like, you know, the Cybertruck’s like off the side, fucking 20 feet from the sidewalk, halfway up a tree, caught on fire, three of them are dead.

And it’s like, speed could have been a factor. Like, yeah, speed was a, speed wasn’t a factor. Extreme weight and 650 foot pounds of torque combined with being a teenager, Those were the weather factor I put, but the bottom line is that the, you know, that’s the other Duesenberg element, right? Is that instead of doing it in a practical, simple way, nothing succeeds like excess 900 volts terrain mode.

So it has like a terrain off road mode. It has like a camp mode. And in the camp mode, it like plays mood music. I mean, I don’t know, like, isn’t part of the point of camping that you get away from the car and the tech and, you know, you don’t need some AI like playing soft music in the [00:38:00] background. I don’t know, really peculiar to me.

So that was my sum up on the Lucid Gravity. Thanks for listening. I dare say it wasn’t as informative as you were hoping. Maybe I’ll give an update if I ever actually drive one. Thank you, Drive Thru.

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