The $500 LiDAR Sensor Will Probably Revolutionise Autonomous Vehicles. May Elon Musk Be Wrong?

In recent years, the techno-sphere has got to acclimatize to the term LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) as autonomous vehicles become more popular. Starting with Tesla, the automobile and a vast number of others are catching up.

LiDAR utilizes laser pulses instead of acoustic waves in traditional RADAR tech to emulate a 3D map of its surrounding environment. Although many people are considering it the spear-point tech for the development of fully autonomous vehicles, the pioneer of this tech in the consumer market - Elon Musk - does not.

"Fool's Errand"

“LiDAR is a fool’s errand,” said Musk during a Tesla conference called Tesla’s Autonomy Day in April. True to its name, the point of the conference is providing the attendees with a general view of the tech and the direction that the company is heading in to help bring it to worldwide’s traffic flows.

“Anyone relying on LiDAR is doomed. Doomed!” Musk warned, citing how LiDAR is prohibitively expensive and unnecessary. At the time, Musk was right on all counts: LiDAR is expensive and there are numerous other techs that could theoretically replace it.

A $500 Solution

At the moment, it is the only tech that is in a widespread application, so we might have to place a rain check on top of that matter. But when it comes to expense, a startup - Luminar - has succeeded in proving what Musk thought impossible is, in fact, feasible: Creating LiDAR sensors at a fraction of its current pricing.

The LiDAR developed by Luminar is named Iris, and the sensor has stepped up from its experimental form into production-ready. Unlike the top of the line LiDAR module that the leading manufacturer of the sensor category - Velodyne - that costs up to $75,000 per module. The Iris system is $500 top to bottom, a 150-fold price cut.

According to Ben Kortlang, the founding partner at G2VP - Luminar’s chief investor, the sensor can meet all of the performance, safety, and certainly, the budget of manufacturers. Certainly, this is the kind of technologic revolution that could change autonomous vehicles for good. However, we still don’t know for sure how the cheap sensor compares to the top of the line in spite of the marketing talks.

Promising

The startup is expecting its products to appear on commercial autonomous cars by a rather optimistic timeline of 2022. In comparison, that is a deadline two years after Musk swore that his fleet of fully autonomous Tesla would start ferrying passengers. If he could fulfill his promise (Which is dubious, considering his track record of being chronically late) before Luminar and their sensors are fielded and with a different sensor tech than LiDAR, he could speak to the world that LiDAR is redundant. Though even then, his argument that LiDAR is expensive can no longer be applied.

Either way, the race to autonomy only gets more intense and could ultimately prove to be beneficial to the world and the tech industry as a whole.