Image used with permission by copyright holderWhat could possibly bring an American car manufacturer and a Chinese search engine giant together? Self-driving car technology, of course. Receiving a joint investment from both firms for this purpose is Velodyne, a Silicon Valley company responsible for a puck-shaped lidar — a laser-based radar system that serves as the “eyes” of an autonomous vehicle, allowing vehicles to navigate streets and highways sans human help. Velodyne has managed to raise an impressive $150 million from Ford and Baidu.
There’s been no shortage of collaboration between automakers and tech companies in the race to put self-driving cars on the roads first. And with this latest cash influx into Velodyne, that race looks to be heating up in a pretty serious way.
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Lidar is of course a critical component for autonomous cars. It works much like a radar by bouncing light waves off of nearby objects to determine their location, painting a picture of a car’s surroundings. And with Ford and Baidu’s investment, this technology could be made cheaper, which could in turn have an effect on the price of driverless cars as a whole.
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Velodyne in a statement indicated that it anticipates an “exponential increase” in the demand for its technology. “This investment will accelerate the cost reduction and scaling of Velodyne’s industry-leading lidar sensors,” said the company’s CEO and founder David Hall, “making them widely accessible and enabling mass deployment of fully autonomous vehicles.”
Moreover, as Velodyne president and COO Mike Jellen told Fortune, the company is planning on doubling its current employee base of 200 over the next 12 to 18 months, as it continues to find ways to drive down the cost of its sensors. The price has already been cut by a factor of 10 (the latest prototype is just $8,000, down from $80,000), and by 2018, Jellen is targeting a price range between $100 and $150.
“As companies have moved from functionality to a never-failing mindset, they’ve embraced lidar as something that fills the gaps of camera and radar-based technology,” he told Fortune. “We’re expanding rapidly.”
How a big blue van from 1986 paved the way for self-driving cars
In 1986, a blue Chevy van often cruised around the streets of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania near Carnegie Mellon University. To the casual observer, nothing about it appeared out of the ordinary. Most people would pass by it without noticing the camcorder peeking out from its roof, or the fact that there were no hands on the steering wheel.
But if any passerby had stopped to inspect the van and peer into its interior, they would have realized it was no ordinary car. This was the world's first self-driving automobile: A pioneering work of computer science and engineering somehow built in a world where fax machines were still the predominant way to send documents, and most phones still had cords. But despite being stuck in an era where technology hadn't caught up to humanity's imagination quite yet, the van -- and the researchers crammed into it -- helped to lay the groundwork for all the Teslas, Waymos, and self-driving Uber prototypes cruising around our streets in 2022.
Tesla issues stark warning to drivers using its Full Self-Driving mode
Tesla in recent days rolled out a long-awaited update to its Full Self-Driving (FSD) mode that gives its vehicles a slew of driver-assist features.
But in a stark warning to owners who’ve forked out for the premium FSD feature, Tesla said that the software is still in beta and therefore “may do the wrong thing at the worst time.” It insisted that drivers should keep their "hands on the wheel and pay extra attention to the road.”
