Three years ago, when Musk made the assertion that "whoever relies on lidar is doomed to failure", perhaps many people did not expect that lidar will now become a must for most automakers.
"Lidar is really a shortcut," said Andrej Karpathy, Tesla's head of AI, "and it avoids the fundamental problem of visual recognition, which is necessary for autonomous driving." Lidar gives the illusion of progress and ends up being just an aid. ”
However, more people in the industry believe that "in a sense, all sensors have their own flaws." "Especially for autonomous driving systems, what is needed is safety and reliability, and the key element behind it is redundancy.
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In fact, musk may not be able to get off the stage.
Incomplete statistics show that as of January this year, 17 automakers around the world have announced that they will launch 20 new cars equipped with lidar, most of which will be put into production this year and next year.
In January, Mercedes announced that it was working with Luminar and planned to integrate the latter's lidar concept into the upcoming production of new vehicles. Previously, Luminar has received mass production orders from Volvo, SAIC and other OEMs.
In the Chinese market, more than ten models such as GAC Aean LX Plus, WM M7, SAIC Zhiji L7, Great Wall Mocha, SAIC R-ES33, Jihu Alpha S HI Edition, NIO ET7/ET5, ideal X01 and so on have been or plan to be listed on the market with lidar - and are also the most anticipated domestic smart models in the next two years.
The background is that L2+/L3 has become a strategic technological highland that major brands must conquer as soon as possible. Car companies continue to improve the coverage and user experience of automatic assisted driving scenarios, which requires perception and safety redundancy to be quickly followed.
"Even with enough data, the current camera performance is not enough," valeo CEO said, adding that safe and redundant sensors are particularly important in complex scenarios where people and vehicles are mixed. "We strongly believe that lidar is essential to achieve a further level of autonomy."
At the beginning of this year, Valeo officially released a new third-generation SCALA lidar, which has greatly improved performance over the previous second-generation products that have been delivered in front-loading mass production. With 4.5 megapixels per second (frame rate of 25fps), the resolution has been increased by 12 times, the ranging range has been expanded by a factor of 3, the viewing angle has been 2.5 times wider, and it can meet the requirements of highway (130km/h) autonomous driving scenarios.
By the end of last year, the Tier 1 auto parts supplier had delivered more than 150,000 lidars, equipped with model brands including Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Hyundai, etc., and the Chinese market will be the company's next key target market.
NIO ET7 and ET5 are the only intelligent electric models in the world with standard lidar hardware in the world, equipped with The Falcon, the first image-level medium- and short-range lidar Robin, which also debuted at this CES exhibition.
Luminar will be the world's first lidar company to be equipped with a consumer-grade L4 self-driving mass production car, and according to the plan, Volvo Cars will release a new generation of pure electric large-scale SUVs later this year and launch the highway L4 level autonomous driving technology for the first time.
The high-end intelligent driving system, called Ride Pilot, will be based on Volvo Cars' partnership with Zenseact (a software subsidiary) and Luminar (which provides lidar), using 1 Luminar Iris lidar, supplemented by 8 cameras, 16 ultrasonic sensors and 5 millimeter-wave radars.
In addition, SAIC's Feifan Automobile (R-ES33) will also be equipped with Luminar lidar, as well as ZF's PREMIUM 4D imaging radar and Nvidia Orin super computing chip, which is expected to be officially mass-produced in the second half of 2022.
This also drives the capital market to continue to bet on the lidar track.
At the beginning of January this year, Ichigo Technology, a provider of vehicle-grade MEMS lidar solutions, officially announced the completion of a multi-hundreds of millions of yuan Pre-C round of financing. This round of financing is led by Xiaopeng Automobile, and SAIC Motor's Shangyi Capital, Dongfeng Bocom Automobile Fund and old shareholder Intel Capital continue to raise bets.
Considering that Xiaopeng P5 has taken the lead in the domestic market to carry lidar on the car, it is obvious that this round of "personal" investment in lidar companies is the importance of key sensors for subsequent program upgrades.
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"On L2+ level auto-assisted driving, lidar will improve the time to get out of hand in high-speed scenes. At L3 levels and above, lidar will become an indispensable enabler for safe autonomous driving. That's the judgment of Gunnar Juergens, vice president and head of the lidar division at Continental.
At present, Continental is cooperating with lidar company AEye and participating in equity investments in the joint development of the latter's patented 1550nm high-performance long-range lidar.
At the same time, Valeo for the first time gave the lidar market forecast data, by 2030, 30% of the world's high-end models will have L3 function, the lidar market will quadruple between 2025 and 2030, reaching a total global scale of 50 billion euros.
In addition, the company expects that with the improvement of active safety standards such as regulatory items including automatic emergency braking (AEB), it will not rule out that lidar will diver to the L2 and below market. "By 2030, 90% of new cars will be equipped with driver assistance systems, of which 70% will be equipped with L2 and above functions."
In the view of Liang Hongyi, vice president of autonomous driving sales marketing at Innvusion, the redundancy scheme based on lidar is the best choice for other car companies (Tesla firmly chooses a pure visual route) to achieve curve overtaking. Especially in the process of high-speed driving, the safety braking of the whole vehicle requires an early warning distance of 100 to 150 meters.
In particular, As a visual background, Mobileye"entered" the lidar Seda, which occupies a major market share in the global market, which further strengthened the confidence of the market. The company is looking for the next wave of lidar dividends: 1550nm + FMCW + silicon optical chips.
Mobileye's solution is to integrate the laser with the chip (SoC) based on silicon photonics technology, combined with frequency modulation continuous wave technology, to calculate the distance and speed of the target at the same time, which is more efficient than the existing time-of-flight (ToF) method.
Based on the FMCW ranging method, it is regarded as a new type of "4D lidar" that may change the future game, adding a fourth dimension on top of the original 3D - speed (direct measurement, ToF is indirect acquisition).
"A breakthrough in chip-scale lidar systems can help significantly reduce the cost of sensor portfolios for fully autonomous driving." Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua expects the point in time to be around 2025.
In addition, ZF's Aeva FMCW lidar is equipped with a highly integrated photonic chip, which reduces the size and power of the device on the one hand, while achieving full-range performance of more than 300 meters on low-reflective objects and measuring instantaneous speeds at each point.
Aeva integrates multiple beams on the chip, each measuring at a speed of more than 2 million points per second at a distance of more than 300 meters. At present, the company has completed the design and development of the third-generation chip module, and the ranging range has been increased to 500 meters.
Recently, the company released the first automotive-grade 4D lidar sensor Aeries II, integrating a key lidar optical communication transceiver module into a silicon photonic chip and directly obtaining the speed of object movement within 500 meters through FMCW technology.
Some industry insiders said that there is currently no universal solution for lidar - cost, application scenarios, technical requirements (vehicle specification level) and body integration design are all one of the factors that OEMs decide which lidar solution to use.
But one thing is clear, most lidar manufacturers are trying to develop further technology. At the same time, as lidar enters the mass production cycle, the cost will further decline, and we will see more automakers choose lidar as a standard configuration for high-end intelligent driving companies.
Most people in the industry believe that by increasing the configuration of lidar, whether it is the existing ADAS (assisted driving) system (such as AEB in complex scenarios) or the high-level automatic driving that will gradually land in the future, it will directly benefit (from the level of new car marketing, it will bring more trust to consumers) and increase the safety redundancy of the system.