On Thursday, Jan. 20, shares of Automotive Lidar Technology developer Luminar Technologies surged 11.52 percent.
According to the latest news, Mercedes-Benz and Luminar announced that the two sides will reach a cooperation to accelerate the development of autonomous driving technology for future passenger cars. It is reported that the purpose of Mercedes-Benz's cooperation is to integrate Luminar's basic lidar technology into some Of Mercedes-Benz models. At the same time, with the realization of the target, Daimler will receive up to 1.5 million shares of Luminar shares, which will be worth more than $20 million based on the current stock price.
However, for the lidar in automatic driving, Musk has repeatedly publicly ridiculed "fools to use lidar". In the field of autonomous driving, sensor solutions have been divided into vision and lidar. Tesla CEO Elon Musk is a staunch visualist, and he has diss lidar many times "ridiculously." Tesla believes that the system using radar must use lidar sensors to pre-draw environmental maps, while also making high-definition maps, so many manufacturers in the industry have adopted lidar + high-definition map solutions. Tesla, on the other hand, does not need either of the above, focusing on a pure visual perception scheme based on cameras. At the 2021 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference, Andrej Karpathy, senior director of AI at Tesla, explained that our approach is mainly based on vision, relying on 8 cameras that surround the body and can cover 360°, through the acquisition of very large data, to build a neural network to make a solution. Musk has also always claimed that the human eye is pure vision, and people can drive by relying on the human eye, so self-driving does not require Lidar and Radar.
Accidentally "punched in the face", Musk also began to test lidar?
The combination of Tesla's vision camera and millimeter-wave radar has inherent flaws: it is currently not very good at high-speed static object recognition, as well as in low-light environments. Although Musk has repeatedly "ridiculed" lidar, in May last year, according to foreign media reports, Tesla has signed a contract with LiDAR company Luminar for test development using laser sensor technology. Social networks have pictures showing Tesla's roof with a Luminar lidar system tested on the road. But there is also speculation among analysts that Tesla may be using Luminar lidar to validate their camera-based fully autonomous FSD system.
At present, in addition to Tesla, most car manufacturers in the field of autonomous driving have chosen lidar. Not long ago, Weilai Automobile also released its latest model ET5, priced at 328,000-386,000 yuan. ET5 is already available for pre-order on apps, with deliveries expected to begin in September 2022. It is worth mentioning that the new pure electric car ET5 launched by Weilai will also be equipped with lidar. It is reported that the lidar has a 120-degree ultra-wide viewing angle and ultra-high resolution, and can detect the longest distance up to 500 meters.