LiDAR industry: high expectations for autonomous driving
The LiDAR market reached US$1.3 billion in 2018, announces Yole Développement (Yole). For the 2nd time, the market research and strategy consulting company, Yole releases a dedicated LiDAR technology and market report to point out the industry evolution and give insights about the latest innovations. With its LiDAR for Automotive & Industrial Applications report, the company pursues its investigations to understand the latest technical challenges and the strategy of each players. Yole’s analysts identified strong investments in this sector. Competition is fierce and lot of announcements related to innovative technologies and investments have been made towards the media community, all year long. From its side, Knowmade announced lot of new players within the LiDAR IP landscape: Since 2010, Knowmade’s analysts saw an impressive growth of the patenting activity. The swift development of autonomous vehicles has opened many opportunities, with the established and strongest IP players increasingly challenged by new pure players and international companies entering the IP landscape.
This year again, Yole Group of Companies proposes a comprehensive analysis of the LiDAR industry. Combining market, technology and IP data, the partners, Yole Développement, System Plus Consulting and Knowmade are offering a wide collection of reports to get a better understanding of the industry evolution, the latest challenges and related business opportunities.
In addition, the Group proposes a dedicated event taking place in Shenzhen, China: the 2nd Executive Forum on LiDAR for Automotive will take place on September 5, from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM alongside CIOE 2019. Discover the past edition and for more information about the 2019 program and sponsorships, please contact: Julie Robert, MarCom Coordinator, Yole Développement.
The automotive LiDAR story began with a race. The DARPA Grand Challenge was an autonomous vehicle race to encourage the development of fully autonomous ground vehicles. In 2005, for the second instance of that race, LiDAR was introduced. Two years later, in 2007, five of the six vehicles finishing that race embedded a LiDAR on their roofs. Since then, many companies have made their own prototypes of autonomous vehicles using LiDAR and carmakers have showed their interest in this technology. The development of robotic vehicles is accelerating, and one leader has emerged.
“Waymo has a fleet of more than 600 vehicles today,” comments Alexis Debray, PhD. Technology & Market Analyst at Yole. “Several announcements have been made about increasing this number up to 82,000 vehicles using Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans and Jaguar I-Pace SUVs.” Alexis had the opportunity to give his vision of the industry and detail the latest technical issues for each type of LiDAR players at SSI International Conference 2019 last week. His “LiDAR: from space to roads” presentation is now available on i-micronews.com, SSI International Conference post show report.
On the carmaker side, Audi has integrated a LiDAR, supplied by Valeo, in the A8 since the end of 2017. It is now expanding this feature to other vehicles such as the Q8, A7 and A6 as an option.
“LiDAR adoption is so on track and other carmakers have announced or are expected to integrate this technology in future vehicles”, confirms Pierrick Boulay, Technology & Market Analyst at Yole. BMW with its partnership with Innoviz, for example is part of them… More info.