I’ll never forget driving the Lucid Air for the first time. The larger-than-life vehicle took everyone by surprise with its impeccable build quality and driving experience. “It’s like driving a UFO,” said Ben Collins, professional racing driver, now-retired Top Gear Stig and onetime Lucid spokesperson. He was right, but all of that spacecraft-grade technology didn’t feel fully baked right away.
At first, the Air’s come-from-nowhere excellence was undermined by software bugs. The interface was pretty but complicated, and prone to freezing, all while the car’s proximity-only smart key was notoriously slow to recognize the car.
Thankfully, Lucid got the smart key dialed in, which is part of why the Air Pure was among our Breakthrough Awards contenders in 2024. But now it’s a new year, and a new Lucid is here with the same nagging key issue.
While the new Lucid Gravity SUV has launched with a smart key, an app and a fairly traditional fob with actual lock and unlock buttons, it’s got the same kinds of access headaches as before.
Photo by: Kevin Williams/InsideEVs
Problems Start Immediately
My bone to pick with the Gravity started five minutes after the fleet company dropped off the vehicle. I took the keys and drove, hopped in the driver’s seat, and moved the Gravity about 30 yards from street parking in front of my house, to the parking pad I have behind my house, accessible via an alleyway. I parked, locked the car via the new fob, and went inside.
Photo by: Patrick George
The Lucid Gravity is a big deal for the brand. The Lucid Air sedan, although fantastic, is inherently not going to light the sales world on fire. Big sedans are kind of a non-starter in a crossover world.
So, the Gravity is meant to make up for lost time and establish Lucid as a bigger player, via more sales. The brand took the basic guts of the Air sedan and, in theory, improved on them for its next act. The Gravity still aims to be a range and EV champ with staggering performance.
2025 Lucid Gravity Grand Touring
Photo by: Kevin Williams/InsideEVs
This seven-seat SUV packs a range of 450 miles and more than 800 horsepower. And, unlike the Air sedan, Lucid is leading with slightly more down-to-earth pricing for a big luxury brute. My Grand Touring tester starts at $94,900 before any options, which brought it to $116,000. That’s a lot of money, but the base Touring is expected to start at $80,000 when it goes on sale next year. Either way you cut it, this feels competitive compared to cars like the Cadillac Vistiq or Escalade IQ.
Yet it’s certainly odd that keys are a problem. I unlocked the car with the fob, plopped down in the front seat, and… nothing. On the far left side of the screen, the screen said “No key detected. If the Key is present, shake gently to wake it.”
Photo by: Kevin Williams/InsideEVs
I shook the whole key fob once. Nothing. Shook a little harder, still nothing. Shook it hard, as hard as a colicky, teething infant would do a set of Fisher Price’s My First Keys. Nada.
The Gravity wouldn’t recognize its key. I could open the doors, including the frunk and trunk, and do whatever I wanted in the vehicle’s infotainment. But I couldn’t put the car in drive or reverse.
Still figuring it’s a one-off problem, and being a solution-oriented person, I decided I’d try another way to get the car moving. After all, the fleet company just drove more than three hours to me and didn’t mention any issues or things I should watch for.
“Okay, let me get out of the car and try again with the NFC card. Maybe that will work,” I said to myself. I exited the car, locked the car with the fob, and walked back into my house for a couple of minutes. Full of hope, I walked to the Gravity and placed the slim card next to the B-pillar.
Photo by: Kevin Williams/InsideEVs
The car unlocked, and I plopped back down in the driver’s seat, just as I had done five minutes ago. The far left portion of the screen now had an animation: I was to tap the NFC card on the center console, coincidentally, the wireless charging pad.
It did nothing. I tried the same steps four, five times. I would try combinations of using the fob or the NFC card; each time the car would hit a wall, where I couldn’t progress any further. If I used the fob, it would ask me to shake the keys indefinitely.
If I used the NFC card, it would ask me to place the card on the wireless charging pad (and not recognize it). The car was effectively soft-locked, stranded behind my house, seemingly working just fine, but unable to move because the next step necessary to get moving wouldn’t function.
2026 Lucid Gravity
Photo by: Patrick George
At my wits’ end, I called Lucid’s PR team to see if they could do anything for me.
After about a 10-minute back and forth, I was to walk away, at least 30 yards, from the car for at least 5 to 10 minutes while Lucid ran a diagnosis and allowed the car to go to sleep. Then, I was to walk back to the car and try again. I hung up the phone and gave their troubleshooting a try.
And initially, that didn’t even work. The “key not present” message presented itself, and I figured my Lucid Gravity week ended as soon as it started.
Until about 120 seconds, the message went away, and I could shift into drive. From start to finish, the whole ordeal had taken about 40 minutes. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be a one-off for me that week.
Photo by: Kevin Williams/InsideEVs
Photo by: Kevin Williams/InsideEVs Photos by: Kevin Williams/InsideEVs
Each time I got in the car, I faced a will-it, won’t-it situation about whether it would drive. Sometimes, the car would fire right up, no problem; other times, I’d be stuck in a minutes-long go-around of shaking keys, walking away, and hoping the car would go to sleep and wake up. Sometimes, it would wake up, but for a few minutes, it wouldn’t turn on its infotainment screens. Sometimes, it would forget the saved seat and steering wheel settings. Sometimes, the middle power sliding row to access the third row didn’t work.
There were a lot of sometimes with this car.
Photo by: Kevin Williams/InsideEVs
It Isn’t Just Us
The Gravity that was sent to me isn’t a pre-production car. Nor were my issues with the crossover only isolated to me. Editor-in-Chief Patrick George got one about a week after I did. He also complained about a semi-functional NFC card and similar shake-to-wake key issues, albeit nowhere near the level of soft-locking that I received.
Photo by: Patrick George
“My Gravity tester required the constant shaking to wake the key, but it never completely failed to shift into gear,” Patrick told me. “Except when I used the key card only. That never worked at all. The Gravity tells you to tap the card against the center console like you would in a Tesla, but it never registered it.”
More importantly, this seems to be a common issue with Gravity owners. Owners have taken to Reddit or Lucid’s own forums to complain about the issues. Take this thread by Reddit user Beaxmous: they complain about similar softlocking issues where the car won’t wake up, or the key won’t be recognized by the car, stranding it in the driveway.
The website Torque News has a story of driving a Gravity long distance, only for it to strand its owner in St. Louis with little recourse. Then there was this guy on YouTube, who can’t move his Gravity because it won’t recognize the NFC card.
This is too common to be just considered a one-off for me. Especially if another one on our team got the same issue, in a different car, located across the country.
What Happened?
I reached out to Lucid, and a spokesperson said that what I’ve experienced is a “known issue with some Gravitys, that we are working to resolve with an upcoming OTA,” meaning over-the-air update. It’s been kind of a big priority at the brand, I’ve been told.
About a day later, the car’s software had an update ready to go from version 3.3.1 to 3.3.2. The update’s changelog said the car’s software had “Improved error messaging reduces unnecessary alerts and enhances Access Control system reliability.”
At least from what I can see, the update helped some. The car’s “no key detected” message still occurred, but it was less often. Also, the car would still go into drive and reverse despite the message on the screen. Sometimes, at least, occasionally, it wouldn’t recognize the key. The NFC card still did not work correctly, though. Patrick’s Gravity tester was using 3.3.2, which may explain why he saw this pattern less frequently.
Still, the over-the-air update didn’t entirely fix our problems, so I reached out to Lucid to figure out what is going on here. A Lucid representative said that not all Gravity owners were affected by these access issues. However, they said the “[Lucid] found that an additional OTA as well as a hardware fix for key fobs is required as a more comprehensive solution for the affected vehicles. This OTA and the key fob update will be communicated to owners in the very near future.”
Other than that, we still aren’t quite sure why the car did what it did, but the brand assured us that a fix was on the way.
On the one hand, building cars is hard. Building a brand-new, software-defined EV on a new platform from your existing sedan is harder. It’s even tough for established automakers; look at the year-long headache Volvo has had with its EX90, and so far, the Gravity’s issues aren’t even in the same galaxy as that EV.
Photo by: Kevin Williams/InsideEVs
On the other hand, the Gravity that Lucid loaned me cost a whopping $116,000. And I wouldn’t be thrilled if I dropped that much cash on a new car, only for the key to work sometimes. It reminds me of a conversation I had with my father after that Chevy Blazer EV left me stranded in Virginia: this sort of thing turns people off to a brand, or EVs entirely.
Experiences like that are what break a brand. And Lucid really, really, really needs a hit right now. Luckily, this problem seems to fall under “fixable” rather than “catastrophic.” But for Lucid’s sake, another round or two of OTA updates had better put this issue to bed for good.
Contact the author: kevin.williams@insideevs.com
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