ABI Research forecasts more than 69M automotive LiDAR sensors will ship in 2026
19 January 2017
Critical autonomous driving functions, including obstacle detection and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), will drive the automotive industry’s adoption of LiDAR sensors. ABI Research forecasts more than 69 million automotive LiDAR sensors will ship in 2026, fueled by declining hardware costs and the need to equip vehicles with multiple sensors to ensure 360-degree coverage.
Even the most ambitious vendors expect their solutions to begin shipping in high volume models by 2019 at the earliest, which will be too late a time for them to capitalize on the rapid spread active safety technologies that will drive shipments of other sensors, such as radar and camera. The scale and frequency of investments in established LiDAR players and more recent OEM and Tier One startups demonstrates the value that the industry places on LiDAR technology in the development of autonomous vehicles.
2016 saw the necessary formation of new investments, startups, and ecosystem partnerships for LiDAR to hit the ground running in the 2019 to 2020 timeframe. The universal focus on low-cost solutions to enable autonomous functions on high-volume models will accelerate LiDAR shipments throughout the next decade.
—James Hodgson, Industry Analyst at ABI Research
CES 2017 saw a number of presentations from LiDAR developers demonstrating low-cost solid state solutions for mainstream deployment, such as Innoviz Technologies and LeddarTech, the latter of which announced a partnership with Tier One automotive manufacturer Valeo last year. Furthermore, current market leader Velodyne received a joint investment from Ford and Baidu totaling $150 million in 2016 and recently announced its intention to develop a sub-$50 solid state system for widespread implementation.
These findings are from ABI Research’s Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) report.
Nope. Won't ever happen. Tesla is not using LiDAR, so the whole idea of using it isn't aligned with The Vision.
Posted by: Herman | 19 January 2017 at 06:23 AM
LIDAR technologies are improving at a very fast clip and getting much cheaper. TESLA may not have a choice but to adapt.
Posted by: HarveyD | 19 January 2017 at 01:42 PM
Herman you are right that Tesla does not use Lidar but Musk employs a group of Lidar experts and programmers at Space X because they use Lidar to control the supply vehicle (Dragon) to the international space station. I am guessing here but they may also use Lidar on the fancon 9 rocket to make it back to earth for a safe and precise landing.
So Musk and Tesla knows all about Lidar and they have judged it is not the right tech for driverless cars at the moment. Lidar has limitations. They do not see color and its resolution is far below that of a camera. So you need cameras anyway. Humans can drive a car and we only have two cameras! Tesla’s programmers does not have to deal with the extra complexity of Lidar on top of all the other sensor input from 1 radar, 12 sonars and 8 cameras.
As far as I know Lidar is not used on a single real world production car currently. They are still too expensive for that.
Posted by: Account Deleted | 20 January 2017 at 12:45 AM