Luminar CEO working to get lidar in hands of consumers

Lidar, the laser technology that can depict surroundings and detect obstacles for vehicles, has most closely been associated with autonomous vehicles.

That's changing. Lidar is still a key enabler for the self-driving future, but in the meantime, it's quickly being deployed in driver-assist systems that help humans become safer drivers. Luminar Technologies Inc. has been a leader in that segment, with partners such as Toyota, Volvo and most recently Nissan.

Luminar founder and CEO Austin Russell sat down with Staff Reporter Pete Bigelow on "Shift: A Podcast About Mobility," during which Russell discussed design wins and the company's ramp-up toward mass production. Here are edited excerpts.

A: The opportunity they see and have ambitions on is to dramatically reduce accidents and fatalities on the road. It's awesome to have for the first time a truly mass-market automaker coming to the stage and putting such a bold vision forward to see this kind of technology standardized on every new model they make.

In the early days, we talked about lidar for autonomous vehicles. This deal really seems to showcase the shift into driver-assist applications and the potential there.

It goes to show there is a clear business case — and safety case, of course — to have this as a standardized technology not just available for a select few as an option on certain high-end vehicles, but as something that should be available to everyone. I've heard our current technology described as a "21st-century seat belt." Collisions and fatalities are still such a massive problem, and we haven't seen any kind of substantial reduction, at least in the U.S.

On that business end you mentioned, Luminar has a stated goal of reaching 40 percent growth in terms of commercial wins this year. Are you on track here in mid-May?

We're at this point already at 50 percent of the way to that goal. We're well on track to meet or beat that goal, and meet or beat all our goals, including the financial guidance we had given at the beginning of the year.

Luminar will go into series production by the end of 2022. What does this ramp-up toward production involve and how many units will you be producing?

We're building capacity for six-figure volumes on an annualized basis, and that will increase further. … This is significant, because the largest test fleet out there today is Waymo at 500 vehicles. This, for the first time, is when we'll see lidar on tens — and very shortly after — on hundreds of thousands of vehicles on the road, in consumers hands, equipped with this kind of technology. It's an intensive journey and we're taking the right steps. We just brought on another key manufacturing partner, Fabrinet.

This is a big shift from pioneering lidar technology to industrializing it. What does this take?

No one has ever built this kind of technology and capability at any appreciable scale. Part of the hard part is the optics industry is a very niche space. In the context of the automotive world, it all looks like mom-and-pop shops. So you have to successfully industrialize everything from the chip level up. It's not something a lot of traditional Tier 1s and other folks have had experience in.

Is this why Luminar has acquired three companies in this space over the past few years, including Freedom Photonics in March?

There's just simply no way, using off-the-shelf components, to be able to do this. It's taken the better part of a decade and half a billion dollars' worth of investment with some of the best lidar engineers on the planet. So that added to the notion of wanting to bring it in-house. And just wanting the speed of execution and starting to get the automotive mentality into these companies that they have not had otherwise.

Can you elaborate on that? What exactly is that automotive mentality you wanted to infuse into these companies?

Everything from quality and reliability to automotive standards. And from a supply chain standpoint, we know how the semiconductor shortage brought part of the auto industry to its knees, with $2 chips holding up $50,000 cars. It goes to show how important that aspect is as well. To be able to secure and control that supply, that's incredibly valuable to have that in-house.

Along similar lines, there's been a lot discussed and written over the years about the speed at which the auto industry moves vs. the speed at which the software industry moves. Have the two reached a happy medium, or is that still being sorted out?

Fortunately, with over-the-air-update capabilities now being built into new vehicles, that's going to make a huge difference in terms of rapid iteration cycles. And people are having to pay closer attention. Now it's getting to a point where when you are doing your planning, you have to be looking at where things are going and where the market is going. Now that compression is happening from cycles of a decade-plus to just a few years.

That over-the-air capability has been talked about for a long time. Are you seeing its maturity now across the automotive landscape?

To be frank, I'm a little bit surprised at how long it's taken to be able to integrate it into vehicles. OTA capabilities are going to be key to advancing and really iterating on the capabilities of vehicles. It's not like all the value is there on day one, right off the lot. Additional features and safety will increase over time, and that's certainly appreciated by the consumer base and will get better and better. It's a shift in mentality, but it's happening.