As the most important piece of the puzzle for urban NOA perception, the trend of lidar on the car is gradually becoming clear.
In the past two years, with the mass production of L2+/L2++ on the car, almost all new power car companies have started a large-scale competition for urban NOA, and the optional rate of lidar is getting higher and higher. Since the beginning of this year, new or facelifted models released by many brands such as Ideal, Leap, Zhiji, Zeekr, and Xiaomi have all been equipped with lidar without exception.
Lidar is becoming the standard configuration of more and more models, not only the mid-to-high-end models in the past, but now the popular models equipped with lidar have dropped to less than 200,000 yuan, and are further popularized. In March this year, the Leapmotor C10 equipped with lidar was priced at less than 160,000 yuan, refreshing the entry price of models equipped with lidar.
The market's enthusiasm for high-end intelligent driving and lidar has also accelerated the continuous iteration of lidar products, and many leading lidar manufacturers have recently released new products with higher performance. Just last week, Hesai also released its ultra-wide-angle long-range LiDAR ATX based on its self-developed fourth-generation chip architecture.
At the press conference, Li Yifan, CEO of Hesai Technology, said that the new energy market with more than 150,000 LiDAR vehicles in 2023 has reached 10.4%, and the number of LiDAR vehicles is expected to reach 16% in 2024.
"I've told my employees: First, I hope the lidar industry can bridge the chasm. Second, if we can cross over, I hope we can be in it. ”
Self-developed chips, along Moore's Law, evolve in both performance and cost
The ATX released by Hesai is a platform-based product that follows the mature AT platform that has been mass-produced for hundreds of thousands of units, and is equipped with the fourth-generation chip architecture, which comprehensively upgrades the opto-mechanical design and laser transceiver module, achieving the perfect combination of small size and powerful performance.
Compared with the AT128 of the previous generation platform architecture, the ATX is not only 60% smaller in size and 50% lighter, but also achieves a maximum detection distance of 300 meters, the widest horizontal field of view of 140 degrees, and the best angular resolution of 0.08°×0.1°. Longer detection distance, better best resolution, and wider field of view give smart cars a powerful three-dimensional perception.
Compared with similar products in the market, Hesai ATX has a tendency to surpass the performance in an all-round way. From the perspective of detection distance, Hesai's ATX has reached a maximum distance of 300 meters, and the farthest range of a new product released by a manufacturer recently is 200 meters, which is only 2/3 of the ATX. Ranging capability is a core parameter that reflects the performance of LiDAR.
Hesai believes that increasing the ranging capability by 50% will greatly help car companies achieve a higher AEB safe speed limit. At the press conference, Li Yifan gave an example: it can accurately identify tires lying flat at 150 meters away (reflectivity of 10%), so that AEB braking can be achieved at 130km/h, and if it can only identify tires 100 meters away, its safe braking speed is only 110km/h, which is 20km/h higher than the AEB braking speed limit of the latter.
In addition, compared with the same level of high-performance long-range LiDAR in the market, Hesai's ATX has achieved an ultra-wide horizontal field of view of 140° for the first time, and from the perspective of on-site display materials, the extra 20° is quite useful for dealing with the plugging of motor vehicles and battery cars on both sides of vehicles in urban scenes.
In addition, the highest resolution of 0.08° ×0.1° can make the contours of the measured objects clearer, which greatly improves driving safety. While the performance is significantly ahead, the ATX consumes only 8W. From the perspective of core parameters, ATX is indeed a lidar product with comprehensive upgraded performance.
As for why we want to make higher-performance lidar, Li Yifan believes that there is still a lot of room for improvement in the current ADAS software, and the performance improvement of lidar will help the ADAS system achieve things that cannot be done before. For example, the ATX is equipped with Hesai's self-developed world's first intelligent point cloud analysis engine, which integrates a 256-core waveform processing core, which realizes fine capture of the full waveform through a high sampling rate of 24.6 billion times per second, combined with the unique full-waveform intelligent recognition technology, which can intelligently identify rain and fog, front vehicle exhaust, dust, etc., and perform "pixel-level" markers in the point cloud in real time, filtering out more than 99.9% of the ambient noise, making the vision perceived by the smart car clearer.
At the same time, ATX's intelligent noise filtering function can also effectively reduce system misidentification and false triggering, greatly reduce the interference of rain and fog weather on lidar, and provide all-weather safety perception for smart cars.
At present, ATX has obtained a number of mass production designations from many OEMs such as domestic leading car companies, leading new energy vehicle companies, leading new forces, and mainstream European and American joint venture car companies, and is expected to start mass production in Q1 2025.
However, Hesai did not announce the price of the ATX. In an interview after the press conference, Li Yifan explained that companies like NVIDIA, Horizon, CATL and other TO B, the media also did not know their offers. "Because different customers have different situations, different mass production times, and different services. ”
Li Yifan said that the price is determined by the market, and in the highly competitive Chinese market, the price of lidar must be competitive. And for the core performance that LiDAR must have as a safety function, will the cost drop get better or worse, and will the car become safer?
"The concept of the product, first, we repeatedly emphasize that cost performance is not the only price, but what problem you solve. Second, we believe that the real way to continue to reduce prices and improve performance is to rely on chips. ”
At present, Hesai's 1~3rd generation chips have been successfully mass-produced and verified by large-scale mass production in the market, and the AT512 launched this year and the ATX released this time are based on the fourth-generation chip architecture. On this basis, Hesai has achieved the "Moore's Law" of extreme performance and extreme cost, which is manifested in two paths: one is to keep the cost unchanged and the performance continues to improve, and the other is to keep the performance unchanged and the cost to continue to decrease.
On both paths, Hesai has corresponding products. Taking AT512 as an example, compared with the AT128 of the third-generation chip, the cost of AT512 remains similar to that of AT128, but the wiring harness is increased to 512 lines, and the point rate per second is increased from 1.5 million points to 12.3 million points, an eightfold increase. The ATX is the second path, and its core performance is improved compared to the AT128, but the cost has dropped a lot.
Regarding the cycle of ATX's generation of products, Li Yifan admitted that there is no expectation, because the Chinese market is highly competitive, and new products must be launched within two years, but this is a big technical challenge. Therefore, what Hesai needs to do is to slowly reduce costs through ATX mass production iteration in the next three or four years, and enter the era of "plate making and printing" with a longer cycle, which is the operating model envisioned by Li Yifan.
What was an "anti-consensus" decision in the past has become a consensus today
On March 12, LiDAR company Hesai Technology disclosed its 2023 financial report. According to the financial report, in 2023, Hesai Technology delivered a total of 220,000 lidars, a year-on-year increase of 176.1%. Among them, the delivery volume of ADAS lidar was about 195,000 units, accounting for about 87.8% of the total annual delivery. Consolidated gross margin for the full year was 35.2%, down 4% from FY2022.
On the premise that the gross profit margin did not drop significantly, the growth of shipments far exceeded the growth of revenue, which also shows that the selling price and cost of Hesai LiDAR are declining.
Li Yifan believes that in the era of commodities, lidar as a commodity, to achieve reasonable costs and profits, enterprises can survive healthily, not only to compete in terms of delivery capacity, but also to operate capabilities.
As a major indicator of operational health, Hesai's revenue in 2023 was US$264 million, of which Q4 cash reserves were US$443 million, and it is also the only lidar company in the world with positive quarterly operating cash flow, fully demonstrating its excellent commercialization capabilities and operational efficiency.
In this regard, Li Yifan emphasized that sustainable operation is more important than price, otherwise it may face business problems and fail to deliver in a few years, "especially for vehicle specification products, our fixed point is at least two and a half years later." If the company no longer exists, there is no point in us talking about the product. ”
According to market feedback, since the start of mass production and delivery in 2022, Hesai has received a total of more than 60 front-end mass production designations from 16 mainstream automakers and Tier1 customers.
Regarding today's business success and industry status, Li Yifan believes that at many historical junctures, Hesai has made some strategic decisions that are contrary to common sense. First of all, in terms of technical routes, Hesai was faced with many subdivisions at that time, such as 905nm and 1550nm, and the choice of one-dimensional rotating mirror, two-dimensional rotating mirror and MEMS. To this day, Hesai still adheres to the original 905nm and 1D scanning solutions, and more and more peers have chosen to follow suit, proving the correctness of Hesai's choice of technical route in practice.
"Why is it so hard to understand at that point? That's strategic determination, and we clearly see that this approach is right, and then we won't be affected. Li Yifan said.
In addition, there are more important decisions on chips. Li Yifan recalled that at that time, he realized that the long-term trend of lidar was to reduce costs and make it smaller, and it could not be done by buying components and assembling them, so Hesai started the road of chipping in 2017. However, chip research and development is very difficult, it takes years of accumulation, and each generation needs to be built on the basis of the commercial verification of the previous generation.
So far, Hesai has gone through four iterations of chips: V1.0 (more than 20,000 XTs equipped with first-generation chips have been delivered), V2.0 (300,000 units of AT128 equipped with second-generation chips), V3.0 (FT120 equipped with third-generation chips have been shipped), and V4.0 (AT512 and ATX equipped with fourth-generation chips have been released). The four generations of commercially proven chip-based architectures have established a huge first-mover advantage for Hesai, and of course, it has also helped Hesai verify the "Moore's Law" of extreme performance and extreme cost to a great extent.
In terms of business strategy, Hesai has also made many seemingly "anti-consensus" choices, such as building its own factory, and currently has the world's highest automation rate of LiDAR factory. In September 2022, Hesai became the first LiDAR manufacturer in the world to achieve "10,000 units per month". By the end of 2023, Hesai was the first LiDAR manufacturer to achieve a cumulative installation of more than 300,000 units, in December 2023, Hesai's monthly production of LiDAR reached 50,000 units, and in 2024, Hesai will continue to climb towards one million units.
Putting R&D and manufacturing together, through R&D and design, and solving problems that may be encountered in production at an early stage, has proven to allow Hesai to quickly build the ability to deliver at scale and with high quality.
"Hesai is one of the few companies that insists that it can only do this well if it owns its own factory. In the early years, customers would think that OEM was a more reliable solution, so why should they trust a factory built by a grass platform? But we did it. Li Yifan was quite emotional.
Li Yifan concluded that chip-based, self-built production lines, and internationalization have determined Hesai's core competitiveness, and have also won more and more customers for Hesai, from which Hesai sees the possibility of tens of millions of shipments across the chasm.
"I used to think that it was not understood by the market. Today, these are the best choices in the market and final perception. We may not be able to do the best with these choices, but we have seen clearly. ”
Whether lidar is useful or not is selected and verified by the market
As one of the proofs of the development of the lidar industry in full swing, consumers have shown great preference for lidar on many popular models. For example, in the large order of Xpeng G9, more than 80% of users chose the MAX version with lidar, and in the new 100,000 orders of the new M7, the optional installation rate of NCA in the urban area reached 75%.
However, on the other hand, lidar has also become one of the hot topics in the field of intelligent driving. A very important reason is that the picture-free pure vision solution represented by Tesla FSD abandons the traditional lidar and only relies on the camera to obtain road condition information, which has achieved great success, which has largely shaken the previous mainstream lidar fusion perception scheme and attracted many companies to follow. At present, many domestic companies such as Huawei, Jiyue, DJI, etc., have launched their own pure vision solutions and began to get on the car.
From the cost point of view, compared with a camera of several hundred yuan, the lidar that costs thousands of yuan is indeed a large expense for car companies. Especially in the past few years, because of the high cost, lidar can only be exclusive to high-end models. Lidar can not only save money for car companies, but also better promote "intelligent equality" in models at different price points.
For this kind of route dispute, in Li Yifan's view, there is no so-called technical route at all, only technical choice, and choice means that if you find a mistake, it will be good to correct it. And with mass production, the industry will soon reach a consensus.
From the perspective of Tesla's solution, with its more than 6 million mass-produced cars around the world, it collects enough rich and diverse data for screening, and uses tens of thousands of GPUs and self-developed DOJO in the cloud for training and verification. In this case, the more the car is sold, the lower the purely visual cost will be.
Sun Changxu, general manager and managing partner of Xiaomi Industrial Investment, believes that Chinese companies are good at continuously reducing costs through technological innovation, and if the price is lowered, the information perceived by lidar is more comprehensive and accurate, and the user experience is better, so the future of sensor fusion is naturally everyone's choice.
In Li Yifan's view, LiDAR does not solve 100% of the problems, but 1% or even lower security problems. "In different scenarios, lidar is a bit like a 'cheating weapon', which can improve security by more than 10 times, and because of the difference between solving and not solving these problems, it will lead to a difference of 2-3 years between use and non-use, because you often need the longest time to solve the problem of the last corner case. ”
In addition, Li Yifan has further thoughts on the value of lidar. In his view, lidar should not only be a functional component, but also a safety component. Taking the AEB false trigger rate as an example, the AEB false trigger rate of the Ideal L9 Max equipped with LiDAR is nearly 3 times lower than the mainstream industry standard.
"The version with lidar is safer than without lidar, with automatic emergency braking for general obstacles, unlimited activation speed, and so on. If I had a child in the car, I would be willing to spend that money. This is a big change in the industry. ”
Wang Haojun, chief financial officer of Pony.ai, also said that if lidar is a safety part and an airbag, consumers' willingness and value to pay will be greatly improved.
For the future development of the intelligent driving industry, Jiang Haipeng, senior director of intelligent driving of Great Wall Motors, said that no matter which route the company chooses, the future is to achieve full scene, full coverage, open on the road, convenient and easy to use, and provide users with a better experience, which is what everyone is doing and the consensus of the future.
Che Yun summary
The new product launch conference was held at Hesai Technology's Maxwell Intelligent Manufacturing Center. According to Li Yifan, Maxwell's name is derived from Maxwell's equations, which represents the unremitting pursuit and tribute to science and technology, Hesai also has a Hertz automated production line, which is inspired by the mass production beat, and the new headquarters of Leonardo da Vinci is a symbol of unbridled imagination and art.
"A good product is not only science, but also the 'intersection of science and art' that Steve Jobs said, and finding this intersection is the direction of Hesai's continuous efforts. Li Yifan said.