What parts on the car are the most curly? That must be LiDAR.

Yesterday, Robosense released its latest lidar product, MX. Officials said they had brought the overall cost to the thousand-yuan level, and even shouted the slogan of "leading the lidar industry collectively into the era of thousand-yuan machines."

A fierce battle over price is about to officially begin.

Fu Bin｜Author

Electronic Engineering World (ID: EEWorldbbs)｜Produced by

We don’t blame the automotive lidar companies, we can only say that the pressure comes from upstream.

In the past, the average price of lidar was still US$30,000 to 50,000. There is a saying in the car circle about lidar that it is "expensive for its price". In 2021, Salon Auto, a high-end new energy brand owned by Great Wall Motors, said the "famous saying" "If the number is less than 4, please don't talk." This provocative sentence seems to imply that "there are not enough laser radars, so don't call yourself high-end."

At that time, everyone felt that it was unnecessary for lidar to be put on the market so quickly. Under the high price, it would be difficult to survive in the new energy field where prices are getting lower and lower. In fact, everyone has a potential formula in mind, which is "high-end cars = lidar", which means cars priced at more than 300,000 to 400,000 yuan.

Starting from the second half of last year, lidar has been expanded to the 200,000-level range and D-level models, and the penetration rate has begun to grow like a rocket. Everything stems from that car - Xpeng G6. Since then, the facelifted P7/G9, Xinwenjie M7, Zhiji LS6 and other models have been on lidar. It can be said that at this time, lidar is no longer exclusive to high-end cars such as Mercedes-Benz, Audi, NIO and Ideal.

In other words, things that Musk once mocked as “only fools would use” are becoming less and less “noble”.

Since the beginning of this year, the market has become even more volatile. Models such as the Zhiji L7, Ji Krypton 001, Ideal MEGA, Ideal L7/L8 Pro, Leapmoon C10 and other models are all equipped with lidar. In other words, the threshold for lidar models has been lowered to 165,800 yuan.

Therefore, lidar can only involute itself and cut prices as hard as possible.

What is the general price level for lidar so far? Sagitar Juchuang’s financial report shows that the average selling price of a single ADAS lidar unit in 2023 will drop from 4,300 yuan in 2022 to 3,200 yuan. In addition, Hesai Technology released a 512-line lidar earlier this year for only a few thousand yuan.

Roughly speaking, four months ago, the general market price was still around 3,000 yuan, and the price of lidar with good performance was generally 6,000 to 7,000 yuan. Now, Sagitar Jutron has brought the comprehensive cost of MX to the level of 1,000 yuan, and implemented chip processing in scanning, transceiving, and signal processing, which greatly reduced the size, power consumption, and cost.

Coincidentally, BYD Wang Chuanfu also revealed at the 2024 Annual Business Meeting that the market price of lidar is 3,000, and BYD has achieved 900, which can be used to further fight price wars.

It can be said that in the field of automotive lidar, there is a lot to see this year.

Faced with the fierce car price war, there are actually many “black fans” of lidar on the market.

You and I both know that the overall situation in the automotive industry is not very good recently. Some car companies have begun to use high-precision maps, millimeter-wave radar, and lidar, saying how good pure vision is. There are even more extreme views in the industry, which believe that lidar is just to increase redundancy, and that all intelligent driving tasks can be completed using pure vision.

However, despite the fierce rhetoric in the industry, "sales are very honest" and at the same time, the performance of head lidar has taken off.

In the second half of last year, the installed capacity of lidar suddenly experienced explosive growth. Moreover, the most enjoyable "eating meat" is undoubtedly the domestic manufacturers. Taking Hesai Technology and Sagitar Juchuang as examples, the sales volume in 2023 will be 222,000 units and 256,000 units respectively. The sum of the two companies alone will triple the total shipments in the domestic market in 2022.

You know, back in 2021, the first year when front-mounted lidar production started, the number of standard front-mounted lidars for Chinese passenger cars was less than 8,000.

By this year, global passenger car lidar shipments are likely to exceed 500,000 units. Most people are optimistic about the next year. Some say shipments will reach 600,000 units in 2024, while others say it will double to 1 million units. Some organizations estimate that domestic passenger cars will be equipped with lidar in 2025. Will exceed 5 million units.

According to CyberCar statistics, among the new cars launched in 2022, 9 models are equipped with lidar. As of 2023Q3, there are 36 car companies, and it is expected that 106 models equipped with lidar will be launched one after another.

LiDAR installation status of new cars to be launched in 2022, picture source｜Cyber ​​Automotive

With such a good market, the price of lidar will definitely continue to drop in the future. This will come from two aspects.

On the one hand, lidar is exploring the semiconductor process from traditional discrete architecture to advanced processes, that is, "semiconductorization", which integrates core laser components on the chip to reduce material costs and installation and debugging costs.

On the other hand, lidar is easier to achieve cost-of-scale than cameras, which is the so-called "Wright's Law" - doubling the output will reduce the average cost by 15%. Lower prices will stimulate demand growth, which in turn will absorb more production, thus driving costs to continue to decrease.

Domestic products want to "do away with" foreign countries

In the past, the electronics industry particularly liked the word "stuck", and the automotive lidar industry was just the opposite. This is a field where the typical domestic level far exceeds that of foreign countries.

The development of domestic lidar is as fast as a rocket. In 2018, among the 35 "stuck" key technologies released by Science and Technology Daily, lidar ranked tenth. Now, the market of foreign manufacturers has almost disappeared.

The Yole report shows that in 2023, China's two leading lidar companies, Hesai and RoboSense, have become the TOP2 in the global market, accounting for 41% and 29% of the global market share. The other three domestic brands in China Seyond, Livox, and Huawei ranked third, fifth, and sixth, accounting for 12%, 4%, and 1% of the global market share respectively.

In addition, data disclosed by Japan's patent agency shows that since 2000, Chinese companies have submitted 25,957 related patent applications in the automotive lidar industry, compared with 18,821 for American companies and 13,939 for Japanese companies.

Looking at foreign brands, French Valeo ranked fourth, accounting for 10% of the global market share. German iBeo, American Cepton, and Israeli Innoviz were all left behind.

For Hesai and Sagitar Juchuang, domestically produced cars are the biggest boost. Compared with foreign countries, domestic and foreign strategies for lidar are not the same. Foreign car companies mainly add lidar to L3, while China has implemented lidar in advance as a driving force for L2+ and L3.

In short, from the perspective of market demand alone, the prospects of lidar are very good. But referring to the RF front-end industry, once someone starts a price war, the days in the future will definitely become more and more difficult. However, this is a longer-term problem. First, seize the current market, and then talk about the issue of shuffling.