I don't normally cover cars. Games, controllers, consoles, the occasional overpriced Bloater statue, sure. But PCMag posted a weeklong test drive of the 2027 Lucid Gravity, a luxury EV the headline pegs at $100K and up, and I clicked anyway, because reading it what kept hitting me is how much modern car software has started acting like a console launch. The full piece is over at PCMag, running down the 12 features that impressed them most after a week behind the wheel.

PCMag's summary leans on flashy screens and big features, which is what every luxury EV maker pitches now. The Gravity replaces a lot of physical controls with displays, and the implementation is what separates the good ones from the ones you want to drive into a lake. The writeup alone doesn't tell me exactly which screens made the list, but these features earned their spots over a full week of real use rather than a parking-lot demo, and that's the part I care about. Infotainment is basically UI design, and UI design is something the gaming side of my brain has opinions about. Good HUDs fade into the background. Bad ones make you dig through three menus to change a setting you used to have a knob for.

It reminded me of the PS3's XMB. Gorgeous in a showroom, a maze in daily use. That floating horizontal bar of icons looked like a Wipeout menu and nested about as deep as one. Car interfaces live or die on the same question game menus do: can you find what you need without thinking? A weeklong test is the only honest way to answer that, and I give PCMag credit for actually living with the thing instead of judging pixel density at a press event.

The rest of the list, per PCMag, covers the usual luxury EV ground. Performance, features, the experience you're paying six figures for. Whatever the exact MSRP lands at, that much money puts you in absurd-collection territory for someone like me, where the bar isn't "is it nice," it's "does the whole thing feel worth it every single morning you walk out to the driveway."

What I keep coming back to is the price. There's a conversation happening on my normal beat right now about $80 games and whether premium pricing is inevitable, and this feels like the same argument wearing a nicer suit. Games that charge premium prices get judged the same way. One good trailer doesn't save a shallow game, and one flashy screen doesn't save a car that's annoying to live with.

If you're curious, read PCMag's full rundown of all 12 features. Even for someone who'd sooner spend the money on every console generation since the NES, it's worth your time, and interface design is a space games and cars now share whether we like it or not.