The market for laser radar absorbing materials is about to see a dawn

Xiaopeng Motors announced on its official Weibo account yesterday that the world's first mass-produced LiDAR intelligent car, Xiaopeng P5, has been successfully mass-produced and will begin the first batch of owner deliveries at the end of October.

As the main selling point of automobiles, what are the advantages of LiDAR?

The perception hardware currently used in automobiles includes but is not limited to cameras, millimeter wave radar, ultrasonic radar, laser radar, etc. Each hardware has its own advantages and disadvantages, and usually multiple types of hardware are used in combination.

The current mainstream radar is millimeter wave radar, which has a lower price and was widely popularized earlier. We know that many car ACC adaptive cruise control models use millimeter wave radar technology. However, this type of radar has low accuracy and is difficult to determine the specific contours of obstacles ahead.

The camera is currently the most mainstream autonomous driving perception hardware, similar to the human eye seeing the world. The system algorithm will automatically analyze the image and find various things in it. At present, Tesla's cars are designed in this way, with very high requirements for algorithms. However, cameras are greatly affected by environmental factors such as backlighting and visibility, resulting in significant fluctuations in recognition accuracy in different environments.

Ultrasonic radar has extremely low cost, but its sensing distance is relatively close, mainly used for parking assistance.

Lidar is regarded as an important hardware in the industry for achieving advanced assisted driving functions and even autonomous driving, especially in unmanned driving technology, due to its high detection accuracy, less environmental impact, longer detection range, and higher stability. The principle of LiDAR is actually very simple, which measures the distance of surrounding objects by emitting laser light. The more laser beams emitted, the more areas and details can be perceived. After rotating and scanning, the three-dimensional shape of the surrounding area can be obtained.

Although LiDAR is beautiful, it is monopolized by Velodyne, an American company. The earliest car LiDAR was priced at as high as $7500, and American companies applied for a large number of patents, making it difficult for newcomers to bypass it. Not being able to afford it is the main problem faced by car manufacturers, which is also the main reason why Tesla has switched to using cameras.

The three main key points for using LiDAR in automobiles are vehicle grade, mass production capability, and controllable cost.

Domestic LiDAR companies have sprung up like mushrooms after rain, including Huawei, DJI, Hesai, Sagitar Juchuang, Beike Tianhui, Beixing Photon, Leishen, Silan EAI、 Science, strategy, and wit. The fastest growing and most promising company is Huawei. Huawei has leveraged its layout and advantages in the field of optical communication, while also seizing the challenge of large-scale applications: high prices. Significant progress has been made since the announcement of the development of a LiDAR priced below $300, with the release of a 96 line automotive grade LiDAR in 2020 and over 40 related patents. Huawei even plans to lower the price of LiDAR to $200, or even below $100.

The overall development of the LiDAR industry is moving towards "low-cost", "mass production", "solid-state", and "intelligent".

According to calculations, the market size of front-end high beam vehicle mounted LiDAR for L3 and above in China is expected to exceed 10 billion yuan by 2025. Considering that the penetration rate of advanced autonomous driving is still relatively low, and the demand for applications in fields such as drones, connected vehicles, security, surveying and modeling, VR games, indoor modeling, etc. is expected to continue to increase with the decrease in the cost of LiDAR, the future LiDAR market in China will exceed 100 billion yuan.