Tesla, which is determined to follow the pure vision route, has become the largest customer of LiDAR companies?

Luminar, the laser radar company that once had the largest market value in the world , has not had an easy time in recent years. In 2023, the company's losses widened to US$570 million, and its revenue has been slow to expand its shipments due to the slow implementation of fixed-point projects by car companies. So in early May, Luminar announced a major strategic restructuring plan in an open letter, including laying off 20% of its employees and switching to a light-asset model.

Just when Luminar was in financial difficulties and its stock price was at a low point, a piece of news caused its stock price to rise by more than 40% in one day. In the first quarter of 2024 financial report released by luminar on May 7, it was mentioned that Tesla became the company's largest laser radar customer in the first quarter, accounting for more than 10% of the company's quarterly revenue. According to the financial report data, Tesla purchased approximately US$2.1 million worth of laser radars in the first quarter.

How could Tesla, which is determined to be pure vision, suddenly start purchasing laser radars?

Tesla's pure vision autopilot system is questioned by regulators. In May 2021, Tesla announced that it would stop using millimeter-wave radar and gradually use full vision to realize Autopilot and FSD autonomous driving systems. At the same time, Model 3 and Model Y in the North American market will no longer be equipped with millimeter-wave radar. By February 2022, Tesla's high-end product lines Model X and Model S in the North American market also cancelled the configuration of millimeter-wave radar. After announcing the discontinuation of millimeter-wave radar, Tesla CEO Musk once said that pure vision would be safer than vision + radar, and vision was good enough that radar actually reduced the signal-to-noise ratio (the higher the signal-to-noise ratio , the higher the signal quality). But after this sentence, there is actually another sentence: "Radar with very high resolution will be better than pure vision, but such radar does not exist. What I mean is that the vision of high-resolution radar will be better than pure vision." This makes Tesla's relationship with LiDAR a bit ambiguous. Unlike the complete rejection of LiDAR in the early years, Musk's statement after Tesla stopped using LiDAR was more "high EQ", and he did not deny the significance of LiDAR for autonomous driving. After canceling all radars and adopting a pure vision system, statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) of the United States pointed out that hundreds of complaints about Tesla models' false braking were received in 9 months, and more than 750 car owners complained throughout 2022 that their cars automatically braked for no reason while driving. In addition, because of more than a dozen accidents in which Tesla cars collided with emergency rescue vehicles, NHTSA also launched an investigation into Tesla's Autopilot function. The results of the investigation showed that Autopilot had some problems in identifying stationary vehicles. In early May of this year, another source revealed that the US prosecutors were investigating Tesla on whether Tesla had engaged in false propaganda on the FSD fully automatic driving system. To make matters worse, NHTSA soon asked Tesla to provide more data on Autopilot and FSD, including how many kilometers the vehicle was driven by the automatic driving system and the number of times the driver was reminded by the system to hold the steering wheel, otherwise it would face huge fines. However, from the general view of the industry, pure vision may be the final solution for autonomous driving in the future, because from the perspective of cost, the cost of image sensors is much lower than that of other radar sensors . At the same time, through some technical improvements, image sensors can also avoid glare and improve recognition capabilities in dark environments. On the other hand, the logic of using pure vision is just like what Musk said, simulating the human perception system as much as possible to achieve autonomous driving, and "bionics" is often the most efficient approach. Musk refuted the rumor online: We may no longer need lidar. Although Tesla's pure vision solution has been questioned by regulators, it will not be the reason for Tesla to use lidar. In fact, since 2021, Tesla has begun using Luminar's lidar to assist in road testing of autonomous driving. In autonomous driving training, especially pure visual autonomous driving, in addition to requiring object recognition and classification, it is also necessary to judge the distance between objects. However, depth data cannot be obtained by relying solely on vision, so the true value measured by lidar is needed as the "standard answer" to allow the visual system to learn to judge the distance only by vision. Therefore, in autonomous driving training, Tesla still needs the assistance of lidar. In fact, in recent years, we have often seen people lining up to get on Tesla's road test vehicles, which are equipped with lidar.

However, Musk also said on social media that "we may no longer need lidar in the future". This also means that Tesla may have found a way to train the autonomous driving system without lidar, which is bad news for Luminar.

Summary:

At present, it seems that Tesla is still very determined to take the pure vision route, and will even abandon lidar in autonomous driving training in the future. As for Luminar's sudden disclosure of customer purchase information at this time point , it seems more like a means to restore the confidence of the capital market.