Musk vs. China's new car-making forces: What exactly is LiDAR?

Recently, Yu Liguo, Vice General Manager of BAIC New Energy and President of ARCFOX BU, said at the Internet Auto Wuzhen Night Talk Forum: "He Xiaopeng released the LiDAR timetable at the Guangzhou Auto Show a few days ago, and was even shouted at by a madman in the West. When I saw Comrade Xiaopeng's angry response on WeChat Moments, as a colleague of Chinese auto brands, I was very excited. Don't worry, Xiaopeng, ARCFOX will also join the competition with Western countries. We must work with Huawei to support and strengthen the power of national brands."

ARCFOX's plan for mass production of LiDAR is closely related to Huawei's years of research and development in the field of LiDAR. It is understood that the new HBT car jointly built by the brand and Huawei will be equipped with three 96-line LiDARs and a Huawei chip with a computing power of 352 trillion times per second. This new car, which is equipped with both LiDAR and super chips, will be delivered next year.

Currently, the Xpeng P7 is equipped with 31 autonomous driving sensors, including ultrasonic radar, high-precision millimeter-wave radar, autonomous driving camera, etc. In the future, Xpeng Motors will add laser radar to the 31 sensors to "create the strongest hardware redundancy design in history."

LiDAR was not a sudden idea of ​​He Xiaopeng. He Xiaopeng admitted in a media interview at the Guangzhou Auto Show that he had started researching LiDAR in the first half of the year, and the decision on the technical solution dates back nearly two years.

"We are different from traditional companies that are engaged in the fourth-generation automatic assisted driving. They use LiDAR as the core to draw LiDAR high-precision maps, while we use visual high-precision maps as the core. From the trend point of view, all the roads, traffic lights, and regulations in the world are based on the human eye to see the world and drive. We think this is the most efficient, closest to real people and the cheapest. At the same time, the combination of LiDAR can ensure safety." He Xiaopeng said frankly: "To be honest, in the first few years, we will place safety factors in a very important position. We would rather have hardware redundancy and software redundancy than fail to ensure safety."

It is not difficult to see that Xiaopeng Motors also agrees that autonomous driving should be driven by human eyes and human thinking, with the visual perception system as the core, and lidar is an auxiliary hardware redundancy and safety redundancy.

Cost is the main reason restricting the popularization of LiDAR. Due to the long-term monopoly of foreign technology companies, the prices of cars equipped with LiDAR remain high, which makes fully driverless taxi companies its main buyers, while ordinary consumers rarely buy this type of car.

However, this trend is reversing.

Last year, Luminar released a lidar solution priced below $1,000, while Velodyne, a veteran company, plans to reduce its average selling price from nearly $20,000 in 2017 to $600 by 2024. The same-level products launched by Chinese lidar startups are less than one-fifth the price of foreign companies, which has leveraged the global lidar market.

Some analysts also pointed out that it will not be easy for car manufacturers to achieve mass production before the price of laser radar drops to the thousand-yuan level, and whether this part of the cost can be accepted by consumers after being transferred is also a problem.

Huang Xin, product director of autonomous driving at Xpeng Motors, believes that the cost of lidar is not unacceptable: automotive-grade requirements have been met and the cost is not as outrageous as imagined and is still within an acceptable range.

"In the future, the development of Xpeng Motors' autonomous driving assistance technology will continue to make full use of the advantages of various positioning and perception technologies, combined with software algorithms developed for China's local road conditions, to achieve richer autonomous driving assistance functions." Xpeng Motors told Travel One.

As for whether to buy or develop laser radars in-house, Xiaopeng Motors said it has been cultivating its own suppliers, but it is still focusing on developing its own software algorithms for sensors. Some practitioners in the laser radar field also told Travel One that He Xiaopeng's high-profile statement has already caused a stir.

"Everyone is waiting and watching. Which lidar supplier will Xiaopeng Motors choose, or will it try all of them? In any case, the new car-making forces will use lidar, which will be a great boost to the entire sensor industry," said the practitioner.