How 10 leading companies are trying to make powerful, low-cost lidar

Enlarge (credit: Getty / Aurich)

Lidar, short for light radar, is a crucial enabling technology for self-driving cars. The sensors provide a three-dimensional point cloud of a car’s surroundings, and the concept helped teams win the DARPA Urban Challenge back in 2007. Lidar systems have been standard on self-driving cars ever since.

In recent years, dozens of lidar startups have been created to challenge industry leader Velodyne. They’ve all made big promises about better prices and performance. At the start of 2018, Ars covered the major trends in the lidar industry and why experts expected cheaper, better systems to arrive in the next few years. But that piece didn’t go into much detail about individual lidar companies—largely because most companies were closely guarding information about how their technology worked.

But over the last year, I’ve gotten a steady stream of pitches from lidar companies, and I’ve talked to as many of them as I could. Ars has now been in contact with senior executives from at least eight lidar companies as well as others involved in the industry as customers or analysts. These conversations have provided a lot of insight not only into trends in the lidar industry in general but also about the technology and business strategy of individual companies.