In recent years, the automotive industry has put forward higher and higher requirements for the performance of lidar, and often different requirements have to be met. Lidar suppliers are faced with one choice or another only from the perspective of product development.
Lidar has been very popular in the past two years.
As major car companies have joined the R & D and deployment of autonomous vehicles, since last year, the lidar, known as the “thousand mile eye of smart car”, has accelerated the pace of getting on the bus. In 2022, many models equipped with lidar will be delivered in China. Many views point out that this year will be the first year of mass production of lidar in China.
But this is only the beginning. Recently, Su Shuping, general manager of innoviz China, pointed out in an interview with the 21st Century Business Herald reporter that from the perspective of mass production of lidar, 2022 is only a small-scale car. At present, it is in the stage of “from 0 to 1”. Whether it can cross the threshold of “1” remains to be discussed.
The implication is that the development of lidar is far from the level of mass production. Su Shuping believes that if the annual output of more than 500000 units is called large-scale, the time for large-scale boarding of lidar will be after 2024 and 2025.
Innoviz is a supplier of high-performance vehicle scale lidar products headquartered in Israel. According to the data released by yole D é veloppement, an industrial research institution, innoviz occupies 4% of the global lidar market, second to Valeo, robosens, luminar and other manufacturers.
Like almost all lidar practitioners, Su Shuping believes that lidar is an essential sensor for high-level automatic driving. Host manufacturers and other technology companies in the industry are putting forward a lot of demands for lidar. Therefore, on the whole, the mass production of lidar has a “bright future”.
But at the same time, she also pointed out that there are “twists and turns” in the real mass production of lidar. In recent years, the automotive industry has put forward higher and higher requirements for the performance of lidar, and often different requirements have to be met. Lidar suppliers are faced with one choice or another only from the perspective of product development.
She listed several common customer demand dimensions in the lidar market, including distance, field angle, resolution, quality, maturity, size, price, etc. for example, for distance requirements, customers must say that they must detect more than 200 meters at least. Such requirements may not be put forward for cameras, but this is a necessary condition for lidar.
“For customers, their requirements are both, and, but if they want to meet all the requirements in terms of performance, there may be no way to meet them in terms of price, even power consumption and product size.” Su Shuping said that they will look at the common needs of most customers in the market, but each company has its own strengths and weaknesses, so they can only deploy based on the company’s own resources, and then develop a product that can meet the market demand to the greatest extent.
In addition to technology, there is another barrier for the real landing of lidar, that is, mass production capacity, which requires mass production with large-scale, high quality rate and high consistency. Therefore, lidar needs to undergo rigorous tests. After a large number of tests, it is only the “first step out of the long march”, because more tests need to be done according to the requirements of customers before getting on the bus.
This is also the reason for innoviz’s cooperation with Liangdao intelligent, a full stack service provider of China’s lidar system. On April 13, innoviz and Liangdao intelligence jointly announced that they had signed a strategic cooperation agreement and formally established a strategic partnership. According to the agreement, the two sides will explore the possibility of customizing innoviz lidar for automobile manufacturers in China, develop sensing solutions, and conduct system verification and data collection, so as to speed up the launch of a series of production solutions for high-resolution lidar based on innoviztwo.
\u3000\u3000 “The application of lidar in car factories is still at an early stage, and their needs have been adjusted. To fully meet the requirements of Chinese customers, lidar manufacturers need to have a strong adaptive R & D team to connect. What we lack in China now is this one. Moreover, this is not only a problem of innoviz, but also a challenge faced by all foreign lidar manufacturers. Chinese lidar companies have it here Inherent advantages, because their R & D teams are in China, they can have some more in-depth exchanges with customers at the R & D level. I always hope that we can also set up an R & D team in China, not just a technical team to connect with customers. After cooperating with Liangdao, a lot of work in testing may be handed over to Liangdao to complete together. ” Su Shuping said.
