We don’t know when this "major update" will be rolled out, but it could be in the next few months.
Lucid Air has a proprietary infotainment operating system called Lucid UX (short for User Experience) that currently doesn’t offer Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, although the company did say that both will eventually be implemented. Well, it looks like the first to come is Apple CarPlay, which was spotted by a Lucid fan who attended a test drive event in Newark, New Jersey a few weeks back, on June 24.
Reddit user Maninae snapped a photo at the event which very clearly shows a version of Apple CarPlay running on the Air’s central infotainment screen. He doesn’t share much about it, only that they showed the system running at the event, although there are other sources that provide additional information and context.
According to Sandvinsd, an Expert Member of the Lucid Owners forum,
My delivery person at the service center said that CarPlay should be in the next major update (But of course no guarantees) Major updates are released about once per quarter. Minor updates for bug quashing are released in between. So likely another couple of months, since the last major update, version 1.2.6, was released about a month ago.
However, many forum users are quick to point out that the delivery person most likely doesn’t know when Apple CarPlay or any feature will be rolled out, and was simply reiterating what had previously been said by Lucid officially. And it’s not clear what Lucid refers to as a major update, because version 1.2.7 of the software is expected to be launched fairly soon and it most likely will not come with CarPlay.
So maybe it will happen when the versions tick over into the 1.3 range, which at the current rate of updates could be sometime later this year, just not in the very near future. Reading through the replies to the forum post, though, it seems that many current Air owners are impatient especially since Lucid made the promise that it would add CarPlay, especially since not all of them are pleased with being forced to use the standard infotainment software.
Keyword: Apple CarPlay Seen Running On Lucid Air Screen At Test Drive Event