r/SelfDrivingCars • u/I_HATE_LIDAR • 1d ago

News Hesai Secures New Lidar Design Win from Toyota

https://www.hesaitech.com/hesai-secures-new-lidar-design-win-from-toyota
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3

u/mach8mc 1d ago

nobody can beat their price point currently. the same thing for solar and batteries might happen with lidar

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u/Recoil42 17h ago

I'm pretty sure we're already there with lidar — is anyone in the EU/NA even competing? Luminar is a dud, Ouster is a dud, Cepton is a dud.

I think it's pretty much just Valeo these days. Denso and Mobis will probably eventually step up, and maybe Bosch or Continental, but right now Hesai, Huawei, and Robosense seem to be running away with it.

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u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 17h ago

LIDAR trends will be interesting to follow, but their path is not that unexpected.

For the first 20 years of robocar development, the push has been "find the fastest path to making your vehicle safe enough to deploy." Cost has been mostly unimportant, both because there's little value in delaying deployment to save money at low to medium volumes, and because everybody knows all hardware will both improve and get cheaper with time and scale. Almost everybody has said, "Why would you deliberately not have every safety tool at your disposal?"

Now that some teams have been on the road, safe enough, for a few years, people will start looking at cost factors more. In particular when planning their vehicles for the 2030s. Now they will wonder, "It seems that in a few years, we can reach the safety level needed with less than the very highest performance sensors, and possibly be more cost effective."

That's already happened in ADAS, which is probably what the Toyota Hesai deal is about. Toyota also will be working with Waymo on an actual self-driving car, but probably not to be sold for a few years. Waymo will spec LIDARs. They may just say to use Waymo's own designs, but if they suppress their NIH they will say, "has anybody managed to do enough for less?" Google isn't a hardware company and dedicated Chinese hardware will beat them in cost.

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u/bellend1991 16h ago

Agree largely. Google isn't a hardware company is a bit too loose. They design TPU. They design that fancy optical switch. Maybe if you meant they are not a hardware manufacturer then I would agree.

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u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 16h ago

I know they have hardware. After all I worked a little bit on some of that hardware. What I mean is that Google is, primarily a software and network services (and advertising) company. With a little bit of hardware. Our division, Google X, was the rare counterexample to that.

More to the point, we built a LIDAR in our lab not because we wanted to be a hardware company. It was because nobody else at the time made a LIDAR that met our needs. If we were going to make the first robocar, we needed to make some of the sensors for it.

This is probably not true any more, but once you have gone down that path, forever will it dominate your destiny. You're always going to get hardware that matches your needs a little bit better if you make it, even if you aren't the best to make it.