David Hall invented modern three-dimensional lidar more than a decade ago for use in the DARPA Grand Challenge competitions. His company, Velodyne, has dominated the market for self-driving car lidar ever since. Last year, Velodyne opened a factory that it said had the capacity to produce a million lidar units in 2018—far more than any other maker of high-end lidars.

Now Velodyne is starting to see some serious competition. Last week, lidar startup Luminar announced that it was beginning volume production of its own lidar units. The company expects to produce 5,000 units per quarter by the end of 2018.

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Meanwhile, Israeli startup Innoviz is also getting ready to manufacture its InnovizPro lidar in significant volume. The company declined to give Ars exact production numbers, only telling us it has orders for thousands of units. Innoviz believes it can scale up manufacturing quickly to satisfy that demand.

Obviously, making lidar a mainstream automotive technology will require millions of lidar units—not just thousands. At this point, Velodyne's rivals are still focused primarily on distributing units to companies for evaluation, testing, and development. The ultimate goal is to convince customers to put in much larger orders for lidar sensors a year or two down the road for use in shipping products.

Both Velodyne and Innoviz say they expect their lidar units to cost hundreds rather than thousands of dollars in the long run. But the companies are keeping the exact specs and prices of their products secret, making it hard to figure out how far they are from this goal or who really has the lead.

The competition: Building a different kind of lidar

To build his original lidar, David Hall mounted 64 lasers on a spinning gimbal that rotated several times per second. Since then, Velodyne has created a number of different lidar models that operate on the same basic principle. Today, Velodyne has models that use 16, 32, 64, and 128 lasers.

Luminar and Innoviz take a dramatically different approach from Velodyne's. Both sell lidars with a single laser that scans across the landscape with the help of a tiny moving mirror. There's an obvious cost advantage to using just one laser, and this approach can give more flexibility about the vertical resolution and scanning frequency of a lidar unit.


But a big downside of this design is that it can't provide 360 degree coverage. Luminar says it can cover 120 degrees horizontally. In practice, this means that a vehicle needs four Luminar units to provide the same 360-degree coverage as a single Velodyne unit.

Velodyne is also producing a solid-state lidar called the Velarray. But based on conversations with the company, spinning lidars continue to be their main focus.



Luminar says its lidar is a cut above rivals

In an interview with Ars, Luminar CEO Austin Russell argued that the big feature that sets Luminar's lidar apart from virtually all its rivals is the wavelength of its laser.

Most lidars use 905nm lasers. The human eye is transparent to laser light at 905nm, which means energy from these lasers can reach the back of the eye and damage the retina. Eye safety therefore requires strict limits on the power levels of 905nm lasers. And that makes it harder to build lidars with significant range; the less energy a laser sends out, the harder it is to detect the light that bounces back.


Luminar gets around this problem by using lasers with a wavelength of 1550nm. The fluid in our eyeballs is opaque to 1550nm light, so lasers at this wavelength can be much higher power without posing an eye safety risk. Flooding a scene with laser light helps extend the range of Luminar's lidar.

While lasers at 905nm can be detected with conventional silicon-based sensors, detecting 1550nm lasers require more exotic semiconductor components. Luminar's lidar uses indium-gallium arsenide sensors to detect return flashes. Ordinarily, we'd expect these non-silicon parts to be expensive, but Luminar says it has figured out how to get the cost of the receiver assembly down to $3.

In his conversation with Ars, Russell also pointed to another factor that gives Luminar an edge over Innoviz. Luminar and Innoviz both use a small moving mirror to aim the laser beam. The Innoviz lidar uses a tech called MEMS (short for microelectromechanical systems) to move a microscopic mirror. Russell says Luminar uses a non-MEMS technique to move a significantly larger mirror. That allows the Luminar system to collect more incoming light, detecting objects at greater distance and at lower reflectivity.


The result: Innoviz advertises a 150-meter range for its lidar, while Luminar says its lidar can see 250 meters. Velodyne says its high-end 128-laser model can see as far as 300 meters, but Russell argues that these statistics actually understate Luminar's advantage. He told Ars that Luminar's high-power 1550nm laser allowed it to see low-reflectivity objects better than lidars based on 905nm lasers. Specifically, he said that Luminar's lidar can see an object with as little as 10 percent reflectivity at a range of 250 meters, a feat most competing lidars can't manage.

In an email, Velodyne President Marta Hall argued that this is an apples-to-oranges comparison, but she declined to provide a range for detecting low-reflectivity objects.

Hall encouraged us to ask Luminar about its lidar's power consumption, since a more powerful laser will draw more energy. But Russell argued that this isn't a big deal. He wouldn't give us a specific wattage figure, but he said a Luminar lidar unit consumes "less than a tenth of the power of the air conditioner in your car."

Secret prices, but declining prices

There's still a lot we don't know about the lidar products coming on the market, and one of the most important questions is how much these units will cost. In our discussions with lidar companies, it was hard to get any of them to give us specific numbers.

To its credit, Velodyne told Ars that its low-end 16-laser puck lidar costs around $4,000—a 50 percent drop from last year's price. The company expects this price tag to drop into the hundreds of dollars in the next few years. When we asked Luminar how its prices compared, the company argued that this wasn't an apples-to-apples comparison. Velodyne's 16-laser puck lidar offers a range of only 100 meters. Luminar says its lidar is more comparable to Velodyne's more expensive and longer-range 64- and 128-laser units.


Velodyne wouldn't give us a number, or even a range, for the current price of those high-end lidars. We know that Velodyne's high-end lidar units have historically cost as much as $75,000. Presumably, the company has cut this price in recent years, but we don't know how much.

The 360-degree view provided by Velodyne's spinning lidars means that those units can potentially cost up to four times as much and still be competitive with solid-state lidars that require four units to provide the same 360-degree coverage.

Luminar's Russell told us that lidar will "need to get down to low single-digit thousands" to be viable in the consumer market and that this "is not an issue" for Luminar. But he wouldn't say how much the company's units cost today or how quickly he expects price to come down.


Innoviz says that their InnovizPro lidar "depends on scope and volume and stands at around a few thousand dollars." The company is planning to ship a mass-market lidar next year called the InnovizOne that will cost "a few hundred dollars" when sold in volume.

So all three companies seem to be in the same ballpark, and all of them said they expect to see prices decline significantly over time.

Meanwhile, there are at least two other companies, Quanergy and Valeo, that are already producing lidar at volume for a few hundred dollars. However, it's not clear if these sensors have capabilities to make them competitive with the high-end lidars offered by Velodyne and Luminar.


Long term, all of these companies could face competition from a new generation of single-chip lidar units. Scientists in the lab have figured out how to fit all of the major components of a lidar system onto a single chip with no moving parts, using a technology called optical phased arrays for beam steering.

General Motors bought one startup pursuing this approach last year, but we can expect lots of others to pursue the same approach in the coming years. In principle, single-chip designs could greatly simplify lidar manufacturing, ultimately allowing lidars units to cost less than $100—cheap enough to become truly ubiquitous in the automotive industry and beyond. But so far, no one has demonstrated the ability to achieve the kind of high performance—in terms of range and other factors—required for fully autonomous vehicles using a phased-array approach.

We also know that Waymo has been working on its own proprietary lidar technology. Last year, it was reported that Waymo had managed to reduce lidar costs by 90 percent—though it's not known what starting price was used for that calculation.