Lidar technology continues to gain momentum

Fully autonomous vehicles aren’t yet ready for mainstream adoption. But the sensor technology that drives them – lidar (short for light-detection and ranging) – continues to advance. Spurred by improvements in price, performance and reliability, the technology is poised for mass-market acceptance and is pushing vehicles equipped with advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) toward broader adoption. To gain a better understanding of the dynamics accelerating the lidar revolution and how this technology is reshaping the auto industry, Automotive News turned to Bob in den Bosch, senior vice president of global sales at Hesai Technology, a worldwide leader in Automotive lidar hardware.

Q: Fully self-driving vehicles may take a long time to hit the roads in large numbers. The sensors driving much of their progress, however, are beginning to go mainstream. How has Hesai Technology’s research and development efforts evolved to reflect the current market needs?
 

Bob in den Bosch: At Hesai, we know lidar technology and ranging (lidar) technology is a critical safety and navigation component for the future of all vehicles, regardless of whether those vehicles have drivers or are autonomous. The autonomous vehicle market is continuing to grow, as we see several of our robotaxi and robotruck customers, like Zoox and Aurora, have already started or have plans for commercial operations in the U.S. and around the world. Meanwhile, Hesai is also seeing a new opportunity for lidar integrations in ADAS for series production vehicles, which is growing more rapidly. We expect that lidar orders from automotive OEMs will grow into millions of units in the next few years.

As our autonomous vehicle customers continue to expand the scale of their fleet, and we’ve won design wins from 11 OEM customers and several of them already started shipping, we have adjusted our R&D focus to mass-producible products that meet the big three requirements to support our customers’ large-scale deployment, specifically price, performance, and quality. Another major push focuses on enhancing the aesthetics of our sensors to better align with the needs of consumers and their vehicle brands. This shift has resulted in reduced sensor size, solid-state sensors and innovations such as moving small new sensors behind the windshield in our new ET25 (an extremely thin sensor that’s only 25 mm thick).

Q: How much of a focus is ADAS technology today, versus robotaxi applications?
 

Bob in den Bosch: Both markets are growing, and we continue to invest in both. We recently ramped up our focus on ADAS since we started to ship our ADAS lidar product AT128 last year, and we do see a near-term opportunity for mass-market lidar adoption across the world. Safety remains a major concern for all vehicles on the road and ADAS makes them much safer. Many of Hesai’s most recent technology investments in reliable and low-cost lidar sensor manufacturing at scale, while crucial to the mass ADAS market, are certainly beneficial to robotaxi applications as well.

Q: Lidar costs have come down dramatically during the past few years. Will we get to a point where it’s cheap enough to truly be a mass-market technology? What’s the sweet spot?
 

Bob in den Bosch: From Hesai’s perspective, we are already there. Hesai is the first lidar company to ship over 200,000 sensors and has secured more than 11 OEM wins for lidar in ADAS, with 6 OEMs placing large-scale orders this year. Hesai’s many investments to lower sensor costs without compromising on performance and reliability now make lidar a very reasonable and powerful part of new ADAS implementations.

Q: What design and manufacturing innovations have helped the sensor industry lower costs so dramatically over the last few years?
 

Bob in den Bosch: To enable the mass adoption of lidar, Hesai has invested deeply in internal automated-manufacturing capabilities. As a testament to this investment, Hesai has a brand-new manufacturing facility that will begin production this year; it’s capable of producing more than one million units per year. In addition, Hesai has pioneered design improvements that reduce the costs of both producing sensors and delivering them in large volumes. These design improvements include advanced miniaturization, integration of system components and core sensor platforms that can be leveraged and rapidly combined to serve numerous applications. Of course, quality also needs to be considered in any cost equation for vehicles, as road safety requires extremely trustworthy performance in a wide variety of environments and conditions. Another area of innovation is in design for durability and safety. Delivery of very reliable sensors in large volumes is not about screening for defects, but instead requires durability to be built right into the core of the sensor designs.

Q: In your view, what role do suppliers play in educating consumers and building trust with driver-assistance technology?
 

Bob in den Bosch: This education component is growing all the time and there is both an opportunity and a rapidly developing responsibility for those in the industry to educate people on how much safer vehicles and roadways are with lidar-enabled ADAS. Building awareness and trust for the safety benefits of ADAS empowers people and organizations to make safer vehicle choices. In addition, this education can help to ensure a higher percentage of vehicles on the road that have lidar-enhanced ADAS capabilities, which in turn makes all vehicles, people, pets and infrastructure near roadways safer. All players in the ecosystem should use their voices to help make the world a safer place.

Q: Another aspect of trust in this industry is data privacy. How do your lidar sensors handle the information that they produce?
 

Bob in den Bosch: Safety and data security are Hesai’s top priorities. Our lidars have a very simple design – they see the surroundings and then send the information to the car - nonstop, in one direction only, just like water though a pipe. The car then combines this real-time information together with other sensors like cameras to make “smart” decisions and navigate the roads. The lidar itself has practically no memory space. In addition, Hesai’s lidar systems do not have any transmission hardware – no cellular, no Wi-Fi, and not even Bluetooth. Everything is hardwired to the car. With unprecedented capabilities, lidars are critical in enhancing safety for everyone on the road while also protecting privacy as a lidar cannot collect any biological information of anybody around the vehicle.

Q: As ADAS technologies continue to advance, we’ve seen shifts in the traditional automaker-supplier collaboration model. What types of collaboration are needed to bring new driver-assistance technology to the market?
 

Bob in den Bosch: Through our various relationships with industry players throughout the global automotive value chain, we’ve seen that lidar-enabled ADAS is becoming extremely critical to vehicle value and that effective integration with other key system components is essential for success. As a result, OEMs are seeing a lot of benefits in direct relationships with providers of core ADAS system components – especially lidar. These benefits have moved Hesai into a Tier 1-type role with many of its OEMs. In the past, sensor manufacturers stood further down the supply chain.

Q: The sensor space is extremely competitive. What sets your technology apart?
 

Bob in den Bosch: The primary thing that differentiates Hesai from other lidar technologies is its ability to deliver the best combination of high performance and exceptional reliability at the required price points, plus its large-scale delivery capacity, which is needed for mass adoption. Hesai has put a massive amount of effort and innovation into making sure its systems are ready to deliver the full potential of lidar-enhanced systems on a global scale.

ABOUT THE PANELIST

Bob in den Bosch
Senior Vice President of Global Sales
Hesai Technology (NASDAQ: HSAI)
Bob in den Bosch is a seasoned professional with over 20 years of Sales Leadership experience in the Optronics industry. He currently manages sales, sales operations, and business development for the AMEC, EMEA, and APAC regions, with previous leadership roles at Osram, Philips, and Lumileds.