Solid-state lidar became the main battlefield
Text/Zoe
Velodyne, which withdrew from the Chinese market at the end of 2019, has recently planned to re-enter the domestic lidar market. One of the biggest features of this is that in the future, Velodyne's main product matrix will be more inclined to solid-state lidar that can achieve mass production of vehicle regulations.
To this end, Velodyne will fully adjust and rearrange its relevant teams in China to adapt to the new trend of the domestic intelligent networking market.
In fact, at this year's Guangzhou Auto Show, the advertisement of the first model of the Great Wall Salon Zhixing with 4 lidars announced the beginning of the domestic lidar inner volume.
Since xiaopeng P5 officially announced to enter the urban NGP and upgraded to the XPilot 3.5 era, domestic driver assistance/automatic driving has entered the era of lidar. Different from the pure visual solution, lidar can effectively overcome the shortcomings of the pure visual solution, so that the vehicle's perception of the surrounding situation can reach a higher realm.
Therefore, in the foreseeable future, many new domestic cars will have models equipped with lidar on the market, which means that a huge market is displayed in front of the eyes.
In particular, it is worth mentioning that compared with the past rotating mechanical lidar, the current car companies use solid-state lidar in mass production models.
It can achieve a good balance in size, performance and product stability, and it is easier to meet the requirements of the vehicle specification level. In addition, solid-state lidar also has a significant advantage, that is, its cost is more advantageous, and this is the biggest reason why it can push car companies to mass-produce it as soon as possible compared to rotating mechanical lidar.
In order to meet the needs of the domestic market, Velodyne, which has re-entered the Chinese market, brought two solid-state lidar products, the Velary H800 and the Velary M1600.
What are velodyne's strengths?
As the former Taishan Beidou in the lidar industry, Velodyne has achieved relatively limited gains in the automotive market in recent years, especially in the solid-state lidar, so it has slowly declined.
Especially after a number of emerging lidar companies such as Luminar have been listed in the Us SPAC with considerable orders for front-loading lidar, Velodyne has gradually been forgotten by the Chinese people.
But even so, the so-called skinny camel is bigger than the horse, Velodyne is still one of the few in the world with comprehensive self-research capabilities from hardware to software, from components to core chips, and it also has its own factories, which are also more powerful in terms of supply chain control.
In particular, it is worth mentioning that Velodyne's two Velody solid-state lidars exhibited at the Guangzhou Auto Show, including assIC chips, MLA coaxial transceiver chips and self-developed two-dimensional scanning galvanometers, are all based on Velodyne's self-developed technology.
From the specific indicators, the Velarray H800 has a detection distance of up to 170 meters and uses Velodyne's proprietary lidar array architecture (MLA). This product combines remote sensing and wide field angle, and can be used in ADAS/high-level automatic driving systems to provide collision avoidance functions for our familiar adaptive cruise, emergency braking, etc., effectively making up for the lack of millimeter wave radar/camera.
As for the Velary M1600, its usage scenario is completely different from the Vearray H800. Its detection distance is only 30 meters, and it is more used in mobile robots.
Because this lidar also uses the Velodyne MLA array structure, it also has excellent perception of the surrounding land, so it can be widely used in delivery robots or other low-speed moving tools.
Another point that has to be mentioned is that in addition to hardware products, Velodyne also has a deeper knowledge of software. Its Vella and Vella development kits, based on solid-state lidar Velary, help customers integrate lidar with other sensors in a short period of time, driving faster time-to-market for projects.
"True" localization is the key to solving all the puzzles
For Velodyne, the most important thing to do to return to China is to do a good job of localization. This localization is not just about setting up bonded warehouses and domestic warehouses in the Chinese market and forming your own sales team, communicating continuously with OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers.
For Velodyne, a strong local technical team is the most critical step in localization.
Technical support depends on the input of foreign parties, in fact, there will be many drawbacks: one is a long exchange time, can not quickly respond to customers' problems with the technical aspects of lidar- related; second, in the current technology is changing rapidly, it is difficult for foreign engineering teams to keep up with the pace of domestic development in real time and understand the latest situation in China.
In the long run, Velodyne not only needs to introduce more competitive products into the domestic market, but also should think about how to tailor exclusive products according to the demands of domestic customers, only in this way can it achieve the purpose of deep binding with local OEMs or Tier 1.
With the increase of production, the establishment of a complete set of experimental or test equipment for research and development in the domestic market, and even the establishment of related factories in China, is the key to reducing costs from the structural level.
For Velodyne of the "second palace", in fact, the current situation in the domestic market has not changed much compared with the exit at the end of 2019, and even the competition has become more intense.
For OEMs, after selecting a lidar and determining their own driver assistance/autonomous driving program, they rarely change their own scheme without major changes.
How Velodyne strives to win over OEMs' customers and strive to occupy a place in the front-end market, price/performance will become a key factor for OEMs in the case of roughly comparable performance.
If Velodyne can't meet the customer's expectations in terms of price, then its road to "entering the palace" will be very bumpy.