News
Lucid launches its biggest OTA update yet with ‘hundreds’ of new features
Lucid announced this morning it had launched Lucid UX 2.0, its most extensive and biggest software update, which packs “hundreds of updates and new features for every Lucid Air on the road.”
Designed as a “true software-defined vehicle,” Lucid says the Air will benefit vastly from the array of new improvements. Including new features like “Instant-On” Glass Cockpit and Pilot Panel Displays, the launch of “Highway Assist” for DreamDrive, and redesigned on-screen layouts, Lucid said the complementary update makes the vehicle more enjoyable and easier to use.
A defining moment for our software-defined vehicles. Our latest software update, Lucid UX 2.0, is our most significant rollout yet. Learn about our new features and overall improvements. #DreamAheadhttps://t.co/yvLFpBPchz pic.twitter.com/w0Cdbi0MNS
— Lucid Motors (@LucidMotors) October 13, 2022
Since launching deliveries of the Air last year, Lucid has worked to ramp production and solve supply chain issues that have plagued the automaker’s progress. Yesterday, the company announced one of its strongest quarters to date, with 2,282 units produced last quarter with 1,398 delivered.
It has been a bright spot on a relatively disappointing year as Lucid has trimmed delivery projections for 2022 on two occasions. First aiming for 20,000 vehicles produced in 2022, then slashing to between 12,000 and 14,000 vehicles. In August, Lucid pushed this goal back to between 6,000 and 7,000 vehicles.
Software Improvements
Lucid’s early EV software has been hit-and-miss, with some owners detailing various issues with basic functions that have made the vehicles stressful to drive. However, the automaker has developed a vast update that starts at the heart of software. SVP of Digital for Lucid, Michael Bell, detailed the improvements:
“This extensive software update, comprising tens of millions of new lines of source code across nearly every updateable computer in the vehicle, is achievable because the Lucid Air was engineered from the start with the capability to get better over time. Thanks to our integrated software and hardware engineering, Lucid has the in-house technical depth to enhance our vehicles long after they leave the assembly line.”
The Lucid UX 2.0 is completely designed and fabricated on owner feedback and ideas, Derek Jenkins, Senior VP of Design and Brand said. “Lucid’s truly innovative user interface becomes easier to use and even more aesthetically beautiful in each iteration, delivered seamlessly over-the-air to the vehicle.”
Glass Cockpit and Pilot Panel Displays
- “Instant-on” displays, so the car is ready to drive as soon as the driver sits down and buckles up.
- New on-screen layout for the Glass Cockpit display, moving the controls for the most-used apps like Home, Navigation, Media, and Phone to make Lucid UX more ergonomically friendly than ever.
- Updated Navigation and maps, with turn-by-turn directions now appearing on the center display directly ahead of the driver.
- More-intelligent prediction of remaining range, so drivers know even better what they can expect on the road.
- Do more with Alexa Built-In voice control, such as change the climate control settings for the rear seat.
- A more user-friendly browsing experience for third-party media apps, making it easier to see options, select favorite tunes, and start listening more quickly.
DreamDrive and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems
- Highway Assist with active lane centering and adaptive cruise control, allowing for even greater driving comfort on long journeys.
- Rear Pedestrian Collision Protection is now also enabled when the vehicle is in Drive and rolling backwards.
- Improvements to visual cues for Park Distance Warning feature.
Intelligent Micro Lens Array Headlights
- High Beam Assist that detects not only other vehicles, but other sources of nearby light, and automatically switches to low beams when most appropriate.
- Automatic headlight leveling with sensor-based adjustments for height and vehicle angle in relation to the ground.
Vehicle Entry and Exit
- New De-Ice Mode combines defrost, automatic wiper blade movement, and wiper fluid to clear ice that may be obstructing the view through the windshield.
- A number of measures to make automatic locking and unlocking simpler, more intuitive, and more responsive with both the key fob and Mobile Key, as well as additional user-customizable settings.
Disclosure: Joey Klender is not an LCID shareholder.
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Elon Musk
Tesla is fixing Full Self-Driving’s pothole problem
Tesla Full Self-Driving is set to get a major fix with pothole avoidance, a feature that CEO Elon Musk said recently was “coming soon.” The feature has been included within the FSD v14 release notes for some time as an upcoming improvement.
Potholes come in all shapes and sizes, but one thing is universal about them, and that is the fact that every driver wants to avoid them. Driving into or over a pothole can cause tire and wheel damage, alignment issues, and even, in some more severe instances, injury to occupants or major damage to a vehicle in despair.
Tesla Cybercab uses a unique strategy for picking up the right rider
Musk said late last night in a post that pothole avoidance while utilizing the Full Self-Driving suite is “coming soon.”
Coming soon
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 31, 2026
Full Self-Driving, even in its most recent and robust forms, still has its shortcomings. While the suite has performed exceptionally well with avoiding on-road obstacles like cardboard boxes, horse droppings, car parts, and other debris, it still seems to struggle with recognizing certain things.
Potholes and other abrupt changes in a road’s layout are things that FSD still tends to struggle with. Perhaps the suite’s 3D modeling is still in need of some additional data or some sort of script that will help it to avoid a potentially destructive pothole or bump in the road that would be easily recognizable by the human eye.
Musk has mentioned pothole avoidance for some time, with the initial idea coming in April 2019 when an owner first requested the feature. Musk said that Tesla would “definitely” develop pothole avoidance.
In August 2020, Musk said Tesla was in the process of labeling bumps and potholes so cars can either slow down or steer around them altogether.
Tesla to utilize micro maps for pothole-detection in future update
Avoiding major disturbances in the road is a necessary feature for Full Self-Driving to have, especially as Tesla is working toward a fully autonomous program that will eventually allow every occupant in the vehicle to sleep, work, or enjoy leisure time while traveling.
That truly begins this week with the launch of Cybercab on Thursday.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk says he knows how to save Earth for a billion years
Elon Musk says sentient AI satellites launched from the Moon could keep Earth livable forever.
Elon Musk spent part of his weekend describing a plan to keep the planet livable for roughly a billion years, and it starts with satellites that can think for themselves.
In a post on X, Musk argued that swapping fossil fuels for solar and wind power will not be enough to protect humanity from what he called extremely severe extinction events, the kind that occur roughly every 100 million years. His fix is what he called sentient satellites, or solar-powered satellites, controlled by AI, that would sit in a fixed spot between Earth and the Sun after being launched off the Moon using a giant electromagnetic catapult instead of rockets.
The satellites’ onboard AI would make continuous, small adjustments rather than waiting on human instructions. The mass driver is Musk’s proposed way of getting the raw material there cheaply by using an electromagnetic launch track built on the Moon, where lower gravity and no atmosphere make it far easier to fling cargo into space than it is from Earth.
But we do need to act much faster than that if people still want to live where the beach is today. We have about 50 years or so to take action, which should be more than enough time for the space satellites to solve any heating problems. https://t.co/xhrVQALwQw
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 30, 2026
Musk shared a Grok generated estimate suggesting roughly 5 percent of Florida’s land, or about 1.68 million acres, could face regular flooding by 2070 under a high sea level rise scenario, and said humanity has about 50 years to act before coastal living looks very different than it does today.
This is not the first time Musk has floated the idea. He raised a similar concept in November, describing a solar powered AI satellite constellation that could make tiny adjustments to incoming sunlight to fine tune Earth’s temperature. Musk has also tied planetary risk to his broader vision at SpaceX, where his compensation package is explicitly linked to establishing a self-sustaining Mars colony, one he has described as an insurance policy against the kind of extinction event he referenced this weekend, and where he has said humans could set foot within five to seven years.
Elon Musk
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
OpenAI will cut SpaceX-owned Cursor’s model access in November, citing Musk’s history of broken contracts.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced late Friday that it is ending its partnership with Cursor, cutting off the coding tool’s access to its models on November 12. The move comes two weeks after SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, folding the popular AI coding assistant into Elon Musk’s growing SpaceXAI division.
In a post on its website, OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” the company wrote. OpenAI pointed to two specific incidents: X, now part of SpaceX, allegedly breaking the terms of an existing OpenAI contract after Musk bought Twitter.
That lawsuit is the backdrop for all of this. Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015, left the board in 2018, and sued Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, arguing they abandoned the company’s nonprofit mission for profit. A federal jury sided with OpenAI in May, finding Musk waited too long to sue rather than ruling on the merits of his claims. Musk said at the time he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit, calling the outcome a “calendar technicality” rather than a real judgment.
SpaceX’s interest in Cursor predates that verdict by weeks. The company first struck a deal with Cursor in April, securing an option to acquire it for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for joint development work instead. As Teslarati reported at the time, the logic was straightforward: Cursor was paying retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its most direct competitors, every time a developer used its product, while SpaceX had idle capacity on its Colossus supercomputer, roughly the equivalent of a million Nvidia H100 GPUs, that Cursor could use to train its own models instead. SpaceX exercised the option in June, days after its own IPO, and the deal closed in mid-August.
Once it closed, Musk moved fast. On an all-hands call with more than 1,000 Cursor employees, he reportedly told staff that SpaceXAI’s Grok was playing catchup in the AI race, unlike Tesla and SpaceX in their own markets, and singled out Anthropic as the company to catch. Cursor CEO Michael Truell now reports directly to Musk inside SpaceXAI.
Losing OpenAI’s models leaves Cursor leaning harder on Anthropic’s Claude, which has its own compute agreement with SpaceX, and on Cursor’s in-house Composer model, the one SpaceX’s compute was supposed to accelerate in the first place. OpenAI framed the November deadline as maximum notice under its contract, and said it wants to “go above and beyond” to help developers through the transition. Whether Anthropic makes the same call is now the open question in AI coding.