LiDAR’s 18-year battle: “Twilight of the Gods” in the West, “New King Emerging” in the East

Originators, inventors, prodigies, dreamers, special forces and Chinese twin stars, LiDAR is a "fighting among the gods", and the industry is being reshuffled crazily.

In the turmoil, everyone is witnessing history firsthand.

In 2004, the United States launched the DARPA Challenge, unmanned vehicles were put on the road, and lidar appeared on cars for the first time.

After 2010, the unmanned vehicle track heated up. Google, Baidu, Uber, and Didi successively entered the game. Many lidar companies entered the field to dig for gold, and staged a "fairy battle" between mechanical and semi-solid lidar.

Now, the overseas originator Ibeo has gone bankrupt, and Velodyne and Ouster have joined forces to keep warm. Chinese players first won the long-range laser radar fixed-point battle, and soon brought the war to close-range blind filling.

In a world of ice and fire, the home field of lidar has shifted to China.

The old structure is on the verge of collapse, and a new king appears amid the flames of war.

Patent war, price reduction, several battles for autonomous vehicles

The first batch of companies to commercialize vehicle-mounted lidar were born in those several unmanned vehicle competitions.

As early as 2005, at the second U.S. DARPA Challenge, the Stanford team took the lead in deploying four Sick single-line lidars, completing the race for the first time in an astonishing way.

This player named Sick is the former parent company of ibeo, the originator of lidar.

Inspired by this, a company that started out as a speaker decided to transform. It was Velodyne, later known as the inventor of mechanical lidar.

Velodyne’s mechanical rotating lidar soon appeared in the DARPA Challenge.

Until 2010, when Google was testing autonomous vehicles for the first time, Velodyne began to tie up with large companies and make rapid progress.

In the same year, Ibeo, the originator that had a glimpse of it in 2005, won an order for the Audi A8. With the determination to build the world's first automotive mass-produced lidar, Ibeo and Valeo headed towards the passenger car market and embarked on another path. road.

Just three years later, Baidu's self-driving car project took off, and Velodyne once again became "the chosen one" and was in the limelight.

But a challenger is about to appear.

In 2014, "dreamer" Quanergy proposed an OPA technology route with advanced concepts and better solutions to address the weaknesses of Velodyne's mechanical lidar, such as high cost, large size, and difficulty in mass production, and became the most popular star on the market. The valuation was once as high as 1.5 billion US dollars.

Velodyne was also unceremonious. After being challenged, it responded by raising the banner of "patent".

In 2015, Velodyne appealed Quanergy to the U.S. court on the grounds that it infringed its US patent 7,969,558.

Four long years of see-sawing. In the end, the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) declared that Velodyne won the case. The two parties reached an out-of-court settlement.

In the same year when the two parties started a patent war, Quanergy executives left and founded Ouster, claiming to be "the first company to commercialize high-performance SPAD and VCSEL methods."

But in fact, Ouster’s early products also couldn’t avoid the mechanical lidar method. Velodyne later freed up and also launched a patent lawsuit against it. But that’s all for another day.

Because Veoldyne’s real rival is the Oriental “Double Star” from China.

Sagitar Juchuang (hereinafter referred to as Sagitar) released a 16-line semi-solid laser radar in 2016. The measurement distance exceeds 150 meters, the measurement accuracy is less than 2cm, the number of output points is 320,000 points/second, the horizontal angle measurement is 360°, and the vertical angle measurement 30°, priced at 46,800 yuan.

This product refers directly to Velodyne’s 16-line lidar, VLP-16.

The measurement distance of VLP-16 is about 100 meters, the measurement accuracy is less than 3cm, the number of points is 300,000 points/second, the horizontal angle measurement is 360°, and the vertical angle measurement is 30°. The price is US$7,999, which is equivalent to about 52,300 RMB at the current exchange rate. Yuan.

The Sagitar's performance is better than its counterpart, but its price is cheaper.

Hesai Technology (hereinafter referred to as Hesai) launched the 40-line lidar Pandar40 in 2017, with a detection range of 150m and a price of US$30,000.

Pandar40 is aimed at Velodyne’s 32-line lidar VLP-32, which has a detection range of 100m and sells for $40,000.

--Still the same strategy: better performance, cheaper price.

In addition to products, the two Chinese companies have also invested heavily in services, which hit Velodyne's weakness.

There are rumors that Sagitar did not consider losses at that time and implemented a 7-day guarantee of returns and replacements. If you are not satisfied, you can get a new one, and provide 24/7 service. Hesai also provides 24/7 service.

This obviously hit Velodyne's "seven inches", and its counterattack came quickly.

In 2018, Velodyne proactively launched a price war and announced that its 16-line lidar would be available to global customers, lowering the price to US$3,999, a 50% reduction.

The following year, shortly after winning the lawsuit against Quanergy, Velodyne accused Hesai and Sagitar of patent infringement in the United States for the same reason. Later, the accused Hesai and Sagitar launched patent infringement accusations against Velodyne in China and related European regions.

The bayonet is red.

In the end, Hesai signed a global patent cross-licensing agreement with Velodyne and paid Velodyne approximately 160 million yuan in litigation-related patent licensing compensation. Sagitar has also signed a global patent cross-licensing agreement with Velodyne. However, it is unclear whether Sagitar paid patent licensing compensation to the other party.

It is worth noting that while the "inventor" Velodyne was busy fighting with the "dreamer" Quanergy and the "Chinese twin stars" Sagitar and Hesai, more players appeared on the road that Ibeo set foot on.

Luminar was founded in 2012. Its founder was only 25 years old at the time and was nicknamed a "prodigy". Unlike focusing on the unmanned vehicle market through mechanical lidar, "Prodigy" Luminar takes a semi-solid route, focusing on the passenger car market, and quickly received investment from Toyota, Hyundai and other car companies.

On the path of semi-solid MEMS, Innoviz, whose founder has a special forces background, later became BMW's official lidar supplier with a demo, and later won a large order from the public.

Ibeo, which is immersed in entering the passenger car market, uses Flash technology to enter the mid- to long-range lidar track. SCALA, the lidar lidar developed by Ibeo and Valeo for the Audi A8, was launched in 2017.

But unfortunately, perhaps due to safety considerations, the L3 autonomous driving solution of the Audi A8 was not mass-produced at that time.

These players have not made much progress in unmanned vehicles, but they all have their own battlefields.

As time comes to 2020, overseas lidar companies are ushering in a bright moment.

First, Velodyne went public through a backdoor SPAC and took the title of "the first lidar stock". Then Luminar, Innoviz, Ouster, etc. were listed one after another.

The market value of these listed companies later generally exceeded US$1 billion, among which Luminar's market value was once as high as US$12 billion.

Drinking wine and glasses of champagne were exchanged. When these overseas companies raise their glasses frequently, they seem to have never thought that perhaps the originator will decline, the prodigy will become dull, the inventor will lose inspiration, and the dreamer will have to face reality.

The seemingly silent Chinese twin stars finally stole the show.

Shortly after the patent dispute between Velodyne and Hesai and Sagitar ended, Sagitar received strategic investment from Alibaba Cainiao Network, SAIC Group and BAIC Group in 2018. In the low-speed vehicle and robot market, Sagitar grabbed the smart logistics platform Cainiao Network, high-tech Most of the domestic robot customers include Xian Robot, Kuwa Robot, and Xingshen Intelligence.

Later, Sagitar launched high-line-count lidar, and successively reached cooperation with Pony.ai, Auto X, TuSimple and other companies.

Hesai received investment from Baidu and Bosch in 2018 and 2020. In recent years, Baidu’s RoboTaxi autonomous vehicles are equipped with Hesai’s lidar products.

By the end of 2019, Velodyne decided to lay off more than 20 people in the China office and no longer directly sell lidar in China.

In this way, the Chinese twin stars teamed up to expel the "inventor" Velodyne from the country.

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The battle between gods and immortals has come to an end.

A bigger battlefield, "The melee of gods"

After several years of rapid development of autonomous car companies, car companies have begun to enter autonomous driving - and lidar is also inevitable.

For car companies, overseas lidar companies such as "Prodigy" Luminar and "Special Forces" Innoviz quickly and smoothly won orders from car company giants, and their momentum is even more fierce than Velodyne.

Citing a few statistics, you can feel how strong the opponent was at that time.

Luminar's testing partners once numbered as many as 50, covering Toyota, Daimler, Volvo, Audi, Ford and other car companies.

Innoviz cooperated with BMW and later signed a cooperation agreement with the Volkswagen Group, winning an order of up to US$4 billion from the other party.

Facing these opponents, China Double Star began to launch another attack.

At the end of 2020, Sagitar suddenly announced a major success and would begin delivering automotive lidar to North American car companies (later confirmed to be Lucid Motors).

Not only Sagitar, but also some new Chinese lidar players have begun to emerge in the battle.

From the end of 2020 to the beginning of 2021, Xpeng P5, BAIC Jihu Alpha S HI, and NIO ET7 began to compete frantically for the title of the world's first mass-produced lidar car.