Lucid Air’s DreamDrive system preps to tackle Tesla’s Autopilot – Roadshow [CNET]

Lucid’s come a long way in the past couple years, and now, it’s building cars at its factory in Arizona. Ahead of the first Air customer deliveries, the company revealed more information on Tuesday about its suite of active safety and driver assist systems it calls DreamDrive.

DreamDrive works with 32 sensors, a driver-monitoring system and an onboard Ethernet connection to power everything. These pieces create the foundation for things like adaptive cruise control and lane centering, even Auto Park. Yes, the Air will be able to park itself, Lucid promises. With all of those sensors onboard, this system will be an ace at spotting things the human eye can’t, the company added.

When it comes to DreamDrive Pro, it gets all of the active safety and driver assist goods, but it will create the starting point for far more advanced features. That includes Highway Pilot, which will provide hands-free driving under the right circumstances. This will work with lidar, which Lucid said makes the Air the first car to include an automotive installation of the technology on a production car in North America.

In addition to all of this stuff under the hood, DreamDrive includes a nifty human-machine interface. This system takes advantage of Lucid’s 21-speaker sound system to funnel alerts in corresponding areas. So, if the rear cross-traffic alert bings, the sound will come from behind, for example.

Really, all of this is just the start, as the company reiterated multiple times in the announcement. DreamDrive won’t touch Tesla’s Full Self-Driving beta (which is not a fully autonomous system), but these basic features at least give it a rival to Autopilot.

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