Lucid targets industry-first self-driving car technology with Nvidia

Lucid Collection The company said Tuesday it is targeting a new goal of making it the first automaker to offer highly advanced self-driving capabilities in its vehicles in the coming years.

The all-electric car manufacturer expects to launch what it calls “mental” driving, where the car can essentially drive itself under normal conditions without a human needing to monitor it or intervene unless there is a change in conditions, such as severe weather. This would be like a passenger playing a card game or watching TV while driving a car.

Lucid said Tuesday it plans to capitalize NvidiaThe “Drive AV” platform and multi-sensor array that includes cameras, radar and lidar — or light detection and sensing, allowing the vehicle to better “see” its surroundings — for the upcoming system.

Mark Winterhoff, Lucid’s interim CEO, said the plan is for the new system to debut “certainly in the coming years,” but he declined to give a specific time frame other than it wouldn’t be in 2026. He said the system was first planned for the upcoming Lucid midsize car before expanding to other models.

“I want to make sure that we can deliver this to our customers within a time frame that I think is very ambitious, but at the same time, we’re also realistic,” Winterhoff told CNBC. “The main reason I decided not to start from scratch, but to do it ourselves, was simply time to market….It would also cost a lot of money.”

Winterhoff said that Nvidia’s technologies will be a catalyst for the system, while Lucid plans to actually implement self-driving technology.

Meanwhile, Winterhoff said Lucid plans to continue ramping up automated technologies in its existing vehicles — the Air sedan and Gravity SUV — in partnership with Nvidia.

“This will be a starting point,” said Winterhoff, who has served as interim CEO since company founder Peter Rawlinson left the CEO position in February.

Many companies, incl GM and Teslapromised self-driving personal vehicles but failed to deliver. Automakers have invested billions of dollars working on self-driving vehicles in recent years, most of them pulling back on spending after years of trying to deploy the technologies.

What Lucid aims to unleash is what the industry refers to as “Level 4: Highly Automated Driving.” As defined by SAE International, formerly the Society of Automotive Engineers, Level 4 technologies should not require human monitoring or intervention under certain, but not all, circumstances.

There are currently a limited number of Tier 4 vehicles on the roads in the United States. Most notably, alphabetWaymo’s subsidiary Waymo operates robotaxis in a variety of cities. Lucid says it plans to be the first in the consumer auto industry.

Achieving such a system for Lucid would be a tall order, especially given its track record with advanced driver assistance systems, or ADAS.

The company, by its own admission, did not live up to its customers’ expectations. It has been slow to launch systems capable of hands-free driving, as many companies offer, or compete with known “Level 2” technologies like GM’s “Super Cruise” or Tesla’s “Autopilot” or “FSD.”

Lucid announced its self-driving technology plans as well as other initiatives in conjunction with the Nvidia GTC global artificial intelligence conference taking place this week in Washington, DC.