Lucid lidar, BMW iX preview, Honda avatar bot, peat for batteries: Today’s Car News
The Lucid Air will likely be first with lidar. Honda is looking at robots and rockets. The BMW iX SUV marks the start of a new era for the brand’s electric vehicles. And could peat help make cheaper EV batteries? This and more, here at Green Car Reports.
With deliveries of the Lucid Air electric sedan due to start later this month, Lucid revealed more about its suite of DreamDrive driver-assistance features. Debut Dream Edition and Grand Touring models will include lidar as part of premium DreamDrive Pro hardware, allowing Lucid to potentially rival Tesla’s Full Self Driving and GM’s Ultra Cruise in the future.
We took a look at the production specs for the 2022 BMW iX electric SUV—all set for this model’s early 2022 introduction except for range, which has only been confirmed at “around 300 miles.” At the least, this controversially styled model might be a strong rival to the Audi E-Tron SUV and Sportback.
Peat, an ingredient typically used as fertilizer or for flavoring whiskey, could potentially be used as a source of raw materials for low-cost sodium-ion EV batteries, claim researchers from Estonia. With sodium-ion batteries recently given some attention from large suppliers, including CATL, could this lead to something commercially viable?
And there are some odd parallels with Tesla in a recent roadmap provided by Honda, revealing it’s working on avatar robots and rockets. But with Honda targeting “practical use in the 2030s” for its robot, the Japanese automaker is on a very different timeline than Tesla and its 2023 Bot prototype.
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