Lucid Motors interim CEO Marc Winterhoff said on Tuesday that hands-free highway driving for the Gravity SUV is “a few weeks” from deployment, giving the most specific timeline yet for a feature the company first promised would arrive in 2025.
“We are right now at what we call L2+, which basically means hands-free driving in the Air, and in a few weeks from now, also in the Gravity,’ Winterhoff said at Bank of America’s 2026 Global Automotive Summit.
“We did this completely in house without any partners,” the interim Chief added.
The commitment narrows a window that has slipped repeatedly over the past eight months.
Lucid delivered Hands-Free Drive Assist and Hands-Free Lane Change Assist to its Air sedan in mid 2025, and said at the time that Gravity owners would receive the same capability “later this year.”
That deadline passed without delivery.
In January, VP of communications Nick Twork acknowledged on X that the company had “ended up prioritizing other software updates, hence a later delivery time.”
At the March 12 Investor Day in New York — five days before Tuesday’s BofA panel — Lucid‘s software roadmap slide listed hands-free highway driving for Gravity in 2026 without specifying a date.
Winterhoff’s remarks at the financial conference represent the first near-term commitment since the missed 2025 target.
Built In-House
Winterhoff drew a clear line between two separate systems at Lucid.
The current hands-free capability rolling out to Air and soon to Gravity was developed entirely by Lucid‘s internal software team.
The path beyond that — to what the industry calls Level 3 and Level 4 autonomy — follows a different route.
“Beginning of last year, we started to look into what is the path to L4,” Winterhoff said. The company considered building the system itself but concluded the cost was prohibitive.”
“We really want to focus on a very capital-efficient approach. So we started to have conversations with many different potential partners,” he added.
Those conversations led to an arrangement with Nvidia, struck around mid-2025.
Winterhoff said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s pitch was ambitious. “He said, I want to skip L2++ and L3. I want to go right to L4,’ Winterhoff recounted. ‘It’s not that easy. So maybe we can help you to get there.”
Winterhoff acknowledged that the partnership drew scepticism at the time because Nvidia had no publicly known autonomous driving miles on the road.
“I think by now it became clear what they were working on in the background, and nobody really knew about it,” he said. “We obviously did. And after Mercedes, we were the second one.”
Positioning Against Tesla
Winterhoff used the BofA panel to draw a pointed comparison with Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system, which he characterised as less capable than it appears.
“Getting to something which is more akin to what Tesla has right now with FSD, which is what we call an L2++ — it drives in the cities, but you’re supposed to look on the road. In the case of Tesla, you’re actually supposed to put your hand on the steering wheel,” Winterhoff said. “That is maybe a little bit convenient, but it doesn’t really give you what you want.”
What consumers actually want, he argued, is the ability to disengage entirely.
“You don’t have to pay attention. You can read your emails. You can do other things while you are in the car. And that only happens with L3, maybe on highways, and L4 then in a full spectrum.”
Lucid‘s roadmap targets Level 3 autonomy — permitting eyes-off driving under certain conditions — in 2028. Level 4, which would allow full disengagement, is targeted for 2029.
At Investor Day, VP of Advanced Driving Systems Kai Stepper described the progression as moving from hands-free to eyes-off and ultimately to what he called “eyes-off, hands-off, mind-off” driving.
A Feature Already Delayed Once
The hands-free feature at the centre of Tuesday’s commitment uses Lucid‘s DreamDrive Pro sensor suite, which includes LiDAR, radar, visible-light cameras, surround-view cameras, and ultrasonic sensors — 32 sensors in total.
The system enables hands-free highway driving with driver-initiated lane changes via the turn signal stalk on compatible divided highways.
It requires the optional DreamDrive Pro upgrade, available from the Touring trim upward.
Lucid delivered the feature to Air owners on schedule on July 30, 2025, but the Gravity rollout was caught up in a broader software crisis.
In the final months of 2025, Gravity owners reported persistent issues including key fob recognition failures, navigation malfunctions, and other glitches.
The company said in January that it had resolved “close to 95%” of the flagged software issues and that the Gravity’s architecture supports over-the-air updates for more than 95% of features.
Subscription Revenue at Stake
The Gravity hands-free rollout also serves as a proving ground for Lucid’s planned software revenue stream.
The company announced at Investor Day that it will launch tiered DreamDrive Pro subscriptions in the first half of 2027, priced between $69 and $199 per month depending on the autonomy level.
Tesla charges $99 per month for Full Self-Driving; Rivian will begin offering its Autonomy+ package in April for $49.99 per month or $2,500 as a one-time purchase.
Lucid said it expects approximately $1 billion in annual non-vehicle revenue by the end of the decade, with software services accounting for the majority.
The company guided for 25,000 to 27,000 total vehicle deliveries in 2026, with the Gravity accounting for the vast majority while Cosmos expected to represent a small volume.
