An antidote to fat, heavy cars? Check out these lightweighting awards.

Although cars are much safer—for their occupants at least—than they used to be, that has come at a cost: added weight. The problem is exacerbated in electric vehicles and their heavy battery packs; rare is the EV we've driven that weighs less than 5,000 lbs (2,267 kg).

Hence my interest in the Altair Enlighten award, an annual prize for advances in lightweighting and sustainability given out by the AI company together with the Center for Automotive Research, which offers a look at some of the avenues automakers and suppliers are exploring to take some of the weight and carbon footprint out of tomorrow's new cars.

Lucid Motors has won in two separate categories. It takes the Sustainable Computing prize for speeding up new car development with a way for engineers to test iterated designs within their existing CAD environment rather than having to switch ...