Velodyne sees demand for shorter-range units for ADAS safety tech, monitoring road conditions, blind spots and objects in a driver's path. “The market is changing a little bit, and we're trying to aim a little bit toward the ADAS end now, where we have lower product costs and higher volume,” David Hall said. “We’re not convinced that the ultimate lidar has been invented by anybody yet. We still have an active program to try to hammer this thing into its final shape.”
Velodyne has formed strategic alliances with three key investors in the past few years, with Ford, China’s Baidu and Nikon investing a combined $200M in the company.
The company built an automated 200,000-square-foot LiDAR “megafactory” in San Jose, CA, in 2017. Nikon is also setting up a LiDAR assembly line in Japan in partnership with Velodyne, and it has a strategic licensing deal with Veoneer, a unit of Swedish Autoliv, to help boost production of its sensors to millions of units a year worldwide.
No comments:
Post a Comment
All comments are moderated to avoid spam and personal attacks.