The costly lidar has a trend of gradual price reductions.
New players have entered the lidar track.
On January 12, Joyson Electronics announced that the company has recently completed its strategic investment in lidar manufacturer Innovusion. According to market news, the investment amount is tens of millions of yuan.
Joyson Electronics will cooperate with Innovusion through its subsidiary Junlian Zhixing to provide ultra-long-distance high-precision lidar for the first sedan ET7 delivered by NIO at the end of 2022.
According to public information, Innovusion was founded in 2016 by senior executives from Baidu, with investors including Weilai Capital. The company is mainly engaged in the research and development of high-definition lidar and related intelligent sensing systems required in the field of unmanned driving.
According to Li Bin, the founder of Weilai, the lidar that ET7 will carry has an ultra-wide viewing angle of 120 degrees, an ultra-high resolution equivalent to 300 lines, a maximum detection distance of up to 500 meters, and a focusing function. Can distinguish more details.
In the current market, mainstream environmental information perception processing solutions are divided into the visual algorithm genre represented by Tesla and the lidar genre represented by Waymo and most car companies.
Due to a late start, most car companies do not have Tesla’s algorithmic advantage, and Lidar has become a shortcut for them to catch up in the field of perception processing. Especially recently, with technological advancement, the once high-cost lidar has a tendency to gradually reduce its prices, and it has become a rigid demand in the field of unmanned driving.
According to relevant predictions, the global lidar market will exceed 10 billion U.S. dollars in 2024, reach 13.54 billion U.S. dollars in 2025, and a compound growth rate of 64.65% from 2020 to 2025.
Market analysis says that lidar may be implemented on a large scale in the next 1-3 years. Hyundai and Ford equipped with Velodyne lidar, and BMW equipped with Innoviz laser products will all launch new cars in 2021. Previously, Xiaopeng, BAIC, Changan, Guangzhou Automobile and other mass-produced models equipped with Lidar were released in 2021 at the earliest.