Beyond the cars, here’s the best of CES

LAS VEGAS — The Ram Revolution pickup truck. The Sony-Honda Afeela. The BMW i Vision Dee concept.

The vehicle unveilings made CES feel like a throwback to the halcyon days of auto shows. But the electric vehicles represented a small slice of the transportation technology showcased in and around the Las Vegas Convention Center last week.

About 275 mobility companies exhibited their latest products and innovations across 400,000 square feet of space.

The ones Automotive News liked best melded big, transformative visions with tangible technology. Here’s a snapshot of the most compelling products, innovations and events at CES.

The landlocked, desert city of Las Vegas is perhaps a strange location for showcasing maritime innovations. Nonetheless, marine technology companies made a splash at CES.

Chief among them, Navier. The Sergey Brin-backed startup showcased two electric hydrofoil prototypes that glide over waves as high as four feet and have a range of 75 nautical miles.

Navier has three variants of the boat. Two are destined for sale as recreational watercraft. But Sampriti Bhattacharyya, Navier’s founder and CEO, envisions more efficient and cost-effective boats playing a newfound role in transportation.

With U.S. coastal counties home to more than 128 million people, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, smooth, quiet water taxis could emerge as an alternative to congested highways.

“If you can suddenly move things on the water at the same cost, speed and convenience as a land option, then the water is no more an obstacle,” Bhattacharyya said. “It’s another highway, and suddenly, you unlock transportation and mobility.”

Swedish company Candela debuted a similar electric hydrofoil watercraft. The company claims it can cruise for more than two hours at 20 knots, enabled by a hydrofoil system that reduces water friction by 80 percent.

Brunswick Corp. revealed a new boat brand designed around electric propulsion and spotlighted a lithium ion-based power management system that replaces combustion engine generators.

Elsewhere at CES, Hyundai Heavy Industries Group, the world’s largest shipbuilding and heavy industries conglomerate, showcased plans for unmanned ships and energy-saving technologies.

There’s a rivalry shaping up in the fledging Indy Autonomous Challenge racing series.

In the final lap Saturday, TUM Autonomous Motorsport’s robo-race car needed to pass PoliMOVE to claim victory in a competition in which one self-driving vehicle defends its lead while a follower attempts to pass.

Instead, the TUM vehicle choked the overtake by spinning out on a back turn at about 144 mph, giving PoliMOVE the checkered flag.

It marked the third consecutive challenge in which PoliMOVE, a team comprised of members from Politecnico di Milano of Italy and the University of Alabama, defeated TUM, or Technische Universität München, in the finals of the nine-team racing series. TUM won the inaugural event, held at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

PoliMOVE will go on to defend its title on home turf. The next race is in June at the storied Monza FA Circuit near Milan.

This will be the first time the racing series moves beyond oval tracks. The extra complexity will help develop more responsive autonomous driving systems, the motivation behind the racing series.

Cars participating in Saturday’s event reached maximum speeds of 180 mph and featured the most complex head-to-head maneuvering yet between identical Dallara AV-21 vehicles.

Luminar, a major sponsor of the series, said the competitions are an important avenue for testing lidar sensor performance at speeds beyond what engineers see on public roads. Data collected is of high interest to both Luminar and the company’s automotive partners.

Sometimes the most novel innovations are also the most straightforward.

In the tradition of heated seats and heated steering wheels, global supplier ZF unveiled a heated seat belt at CES. The so-called heat belts offer a source of warmth and comfort, and can allow passengers to remove bulky coats.

Occupants won’t notice much difference from conventional seat belts. Small wires that conduct the heat are woven directly into the belt structure. But this basic addition belies the broader implications for the EV age.

Cold weather diminishes battery range by as much as 30 percent, according to ZF, and motorists can exacerbate already-reduced performance by cranking up the heat. Reducing the amount of battery current used to heat the vehicle interior enables a range gain of as much as 15 percent, the company said.

“It’s so simple that when you think about it, it’s pretty amazing it took until 2022 to come up with it,” said Martin Fischer, a member of ZF’s management board at CES.

Soybean oil and rice, common items found in many kitchens, are also part of the recipe for new tires being developed by Goodyear.

The company demonstrated a tire made from 90 percent sustainable materials. In testing, the tires have reduced rolling resistance compared with conventional tires, offering the prospect of better fuel economy or EV range.

Seventeen ingredients go into the tire. Goodyear is using soybean oil to reduce its reliance on petroleum-based products in manufacturing. Silica derived from rice husk residue that goes to landfills is used to improve grip, the company said.

The tire, demonstrated along the Las Vegas Strip, uses four types of carbon black produced from methane, carbon dioxide, plant-based oils and end-of-life oil feedstock.

“It all goes back to where you source carbon from going forward,” said Goodyear senior director Erin Spring. “We are figuring out what are really the best methods going forward. We use a lot of raw materials, and there are a lot of opportunities.”

Goodyear intends to offer a tire made of 100 percent sustainable materials for sale by 2030. The 90 percent demonstration tire marks progress toward that goal. A year ago at CES, Goodyear showed a 70 percent sustainable tire. That tire goes on sale to the public in 2023.

Imagine a technology that could slash EV charging times, eliminate onboard chargers, drop vehicle weight, cut costs and offer longer range.

It sounds like one of those CES technologies that’s too good to be true. But it’s the promise claimed by Canadian startup eLeap Power.

The company makes an integrated inverter that uses the windings and magnetics in the motors of electric vehicles to handle the AC to DC power conversion, eliminating the need for onboard chargers. It can charge from both 400-volt and 800-volt chargers and offer bidirectional charging.

As much as six gigatons of carbon emissions can be reduced per year by 2040 utilizing the inverter, according to Russell Pullan, eLeap Power’s CEO.

“We’ve completely reimagined charging in electric vehicles outside and inside,” he said.

Spun out of the University of Toronto Research Center and founded in 2016, the company said at CES it will supply 50,000 inverters to China’s Chery Automobile Co. Ltd. in 2023 to power commercial vans. eLeap Power is also collaborating with India-based Pinnacle Mobility Solutions to integrate its inverters into electric transit buses.