Velodyne aims to price new self-driving car sensor below $500

November 13, 2020

By Stephen Nellis

(Reuters) – Velodyne Lidar Inc explained on Friday it would introduce a new lidar device, a critical sensor in self-driving cars, with a goal selling price point of considerably less than $500 and no relocating sections.

Velodyne turned a general public enterprise in September and is a person of several providers vying to offer automakers with lidar, a sensor that generates a a few-dimensional map of the road forward. Velodyne was an early entrant into the industry, and its models have powered study functions for many automakers.

Some of those early analysis units were being cumbersome, contained quite a few going sections and cost properly above $10,000. For mass generation in passenger motor vehicles, automakers and their important suppliers search for units that are modern adequate to fit into attractive automobile layouts and value properly down below $1,000.

The autonomous car or truck technologies enterprise claimed the Velarray H800 will have a goal cost of a lot less than $500. In an job interview with Reuters, Velodyne Main Executive Anand Gopalan stated the corporation is working with contract producing husband or wife Fabrinet to assemble test products and that mass output will happen at a Fabrinet manufacturing facility in Thailand.

Velodyne expects automotive-quality mass manufacturing to be beneath way by the next fifty percent of 2021 and that the units could demonstrate up in cars in 2022 or 2023, Gopalan advised Reuters.

“We have very clear line of sight into being equipped to hit people expenditures these days,” he claimed of the sub-$500 selling price level.

The organization stated the device will have no relocating pieces – recognized as “solid state” in the business – and will be modest sufficient to in good shape powering the windshield of a motor vehicle. It reported the sensor can be employed for self-driving cars or existing driver-help functions this sort of as crisis braking and lane-preserving assistance.

Velodyne is among the a trio of lidar technologies developers coming to public markets. Silicon Valley firm Aeva Inc aims to go public by merging with blank-check out acquisition firm InterPrivate Acquisition Corp , and Luminar Technologies Inc is doing the job by a identical transaction with Gores Metropoulos Inc .

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco, Enhancing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips and Paul Simao)