Orange Business will serve up in-car features for Lucid’s teched-up cars

American electric car firm Lucid has signed a deal with Orange Business, the B2B arm of the French operator, to provide it with technology inside its software-defined vehicles.

Lucid is prepping an expansion into Europe and Orange Business will provide the ‘infotainment and telematics connectivity’ for the software-defined vehicles sold in the region. More specifically this seems to be about navigation, security and communication tools, diagnostics, and audio streaming features.

As well as building out the in-car fun, Orange also apparently helped Lucid adapt connectivity test procedures for vehicles delivered into Europe and ‘orchestrate the customer journey in Europe, simplifying and navigating complex regulatory requirements.’ So that’s nice of them.

“Lucid is not only building sleek and luxurious EVs for sustainable mobility, but they are keenly focused on delivering a premium user experience,” said Scott Williams, Senior Vice President of the Americas, Orange Business. “Providing a personalized customer experience that creates value is exactly how Orange Business wants to support its customers. We are proud to have the application development, data analytics, network and integration experience, and assets to help American automotive companies like Lucid expand operations in Europe.”

We saw a few fancy new cars being shown off at CES earlier this year, and aside from poking fun at the slightly ludicrous claims –  like this gem which accompanied Sony and Honda’s release: ‘AFEELA expresses an interactive relationship where people “FEEL” mobility as an intelligent entity, and mobility “FEELs” people and society using sensing and network IT technologies’ – the thing of note was an apparent shift in emphasis away from autonomous or self-driving features which previously had defined these sorts of cutting edge/concept cars.

Software defined vehicles seems to be the more voguish term for teched-up motors, and one that Lucid apparently opts for. The messaging now appears to be more about over-the-air updates, in-car entertainment systems and in some cases digital camouflage.

Perhaps this is because as it turns out, actually bringing together all the technological and regulatory moving parts that would make driverless cars workable, safe and popular in the wild is a much harder task than, say, marching up and down talking about it vaguely on a stage in Vegas.

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