LiDAR: Why doesn’t Musk want me?

Therefore, if LiDAR is to be used for autonomous driving, cost reduction is an inevitable trend. Perhaps it is precisely because of the market uncertainty about LiDAR cost reduction that Luminar's stock price has experienced a sharp correction for several consecutive days after its surge.

Fortunately, some companies that were once outside the automotive industry also see autonomous driving as a blue ocean in the future and have invested in the development of LiDAR. Take Huawei as an example, which revealed that its goal is to develop a 100-line product in the short term and reduce the cost to US$200 (about RMB 1,309) or even US$100 (about RMB 654) in the future; in addition, drone giant DJI also announced in August this year that it can mass-produce thousand-yuan-level LiDARs suitable for L3 and L4 levels, and the corresponding products Horizon and Tele-15 are priced at US$800 (about RMB 5,236) and US$1,200 (about RMB 7,853) respectively.

Of course, Tesla's vision fusion solution is not completely undesirable. It compensates for visual defects by integrating millimeter-wave radar and ultrasonic sensors, and uses its own strong chip development team to create chips with more powerful computing power that meet automotive standards.

In the future, achieving fully autonomous driving will definitely not be a one-way street.

On the road of full market competition, it depends on whether the speed of price reduction of LiDAR can take precedence over the speed of computing power improvement of the vision fusion team.

In any case, the original intention of autonomous driving is to make people happier when traveling; no company should be obsessed with a certain technology or solution; after all, a slight delay and error may make many families miserable.