Autonomous Promises

Lucid wants to be among the first automakers to offer an SAE Level 4 system in a consumer car.

The luxury EV maker revealed a partnership with Nvidia to engineer a system that would give robotaxi-like capabilities to a consumer car, at least if/when the tech is ready. And the upcoming Lucid Earth, set to go on sale in 2026 with a starting price of around $50,000, is slated to feature all the hardware that’s necessary for this level of autonomy.

Just how close is the utopia in which one will be able to nap on the way to work?

Lucid plans to start with what it calls a Level 2++ that will still be an eyes-on system and will be offered in the Lucid Gravity in addition to Earth. But the eventual goal is to permit eyes-off, hands-off, and mind-off driving.

Nvidia’s Drive AV platform will serve as the backbone for this system, and will use lidar, radar, and camera sensors, with Lucid planning to use two of Nvidia’s Drive AGX Thor computers to power the automated driving functions. The planned Level 4 system will also make use of Nvidia’s Drive OS, billed as an AI computing platform, to bring the Waymo experience to consumer-owned cars. 

How realistic are these plans?

Lucid is certainly not promising anything overnight, or putting a concrete timeline on the availability of Level 4 driving. As we’ve seen elsewhere in the autonomous industry, namely with robotaxi leader Waymo, such systems are dependent on local regulations in a given jurisdiction, on the scale of limited sections of cities, and have required months if not years of mapping a given geofenced area. They also require plenty of staff working behind the scenes to operate even a small fleet. These barriers are unlikely to vanish anytime soon..

Lucid is also not promising to blur the lines between the defined levels of automated driving on this journey, cognizant of Tesla’s own hubris, litigation, and decade of empty promises to bring about what it still calls Full Self-Driving, even though these Level 4 plans rely on some assumptions and tech that has yet to materialize. 

The greater trend here is that some automakers other than Tesla now see a clearer path to Levels 3 and 4 – offering a fuller suite of sensors and computing power that should permit such capabilities to be offered down the road, even absent a 50-state regulatory standard for such systems at the moment. Just days ago Cadillac unveiled plans for a Level 3, eyes-off, system expected to launch in 2028, building upon GM’s Super Cruise that is similarly set to evolve in capability even absent a single federal autonomous driving standard.

The drop in the costs of lidar sensors is just one of the things that are powering this new confidence along with leaps in computing power, but another crucial driving force is Nvidia’s launch of its own autonomous vehicle program. 

For now, Lucid’s rosy view of its Level 4 plans give us our best look yet at the Earth midsize crossover, which will bring a much-needed more affordable model to Lucid’s model range while battling the likes of the Tesla Model Y.

The Earth will still land is what has been the busiest EV segment so far this decade, and one that has seen some painful sales duds by now. And Lucid’s upcoming midsize model will still need to set itself apart in more basic ways than promises of future autonomous driving to capture a slice of this segment.