Although established for less than five years, the Israeli LiDAR startup Innoviz is already a member of the industry's first echelon.
LiDAR has always been regarded as a necessary condition for fully automated driving systems, but now it is beginning to "fly into the homes of ordinary people" to provide support for lower-level partial automated driving systems.
Innoviz's new LiDAR sensor InnovizTwo is for this purpose.
At present, Innoviz already has the vehicle-level LiDAR sensor InnovizOne, which will be officially mass-produced with the assistance of BMW next year. It is reported that this LiDAR will become the core of a Level 3 semi-autonomous driving system. As for higher-level systems, you may have to wait a few more years.
Because of this, the OEMs and Tier1 have made new calculations. They may use LiDAR on L2 and L3 autopilot systems to recover some of the investment costs.
Market research organization Guidehouse Insights predicts that cars equipped with L2/3 semi-autonomous driving functions can sell 60 million units each year, so the LiDAR sensor market can reach 32 million U.S. dollars.
Although at the level of L3, the driver can release his hands and feet properly, the applicable area is quite limited.
Recently, the European Commission has passed new regulations requiring the speed limit of L3 autonomous driving to be below 60 km/h. In other words, in the stop-and-go road conditions, drivers can free their hands to do other things, but after the speed exceeds 60 km per hour, they still have to take over the vehicle.
Recently, Mercedes-Benz announced that their first L3 system will be unveiled in the middle of next year along with the new S-Class. BMW's production version of the iNext electric car will also be released at the same time. However, Mercedes-Benz did not designate a LiDAR supplier.
"For luxury cars equipped with Level 3 systems, the upper limit of the LiDAR price in the heart of OEMs is usually $1,000." Innoviz co-founder and CEO Omer Keilaf said. "As for Level 2, LiDAR can't be sold at a high price anymore. 400-500 US dollars is the sky."
It should be noted that the OEM spends these money not only to buy physical hardware, but also the supporting software behind it and the related costs of development and verification. In addition, traditional giants may not be willing or daring to directly hand over such important parts to start-up companies like Innoviz. They still believe in the manufacturing and integration capabilities of Tier 1 suppliers.
In this context, Innoviz simply recruited Magna (Magna) to cooperate. The latter will not only be responsible for the manufacture of InnovizOne, but also integrate other parts and give BMW a complete set of L3 system (the vision system is Mobileye EyeQ5, radar And the computing platform comes from Anbofu).
Of course, Magna will not make money with Ben. In the future, they will definitely put Innoviz a lot of pressure on prices.
In fact, after completing the design of InnovizOne, Innoviz began to engage in a new generation of design.
Keilaf pointed out that the performance of the new sensor can fully surpass InnovizOne and can be used in the L4 Robotaxi service. However, the reality is that L2 and L3 are the most popular, so they simply downgraded the design. While maintaining the same or even stronger performance, they directly cut the price by 70%.
The key components of LiDAR sensor are control chip, application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), laser, beam control device and photodetector. In addition to lasers, Innoviz has mastered the intellectual property rights of all key technologies.
On InnovizTwo, the same ASIC was retained, but the MEMS mechanism and detector used for beam control had to be completely rewritten. In other words, InnovizTwo is definitely stronger than the previous design, but the price is lower.
As for the changes, Kelief did not elaborate.
However, it is conceivable that the luxurious configuration of the four lasers on InnovizOne will definitely shrink, so the detector must be further improved in sensitivity, and at the same time the software is used to strengthen the filtering of interference.
Like InnovizOne, InnovizTwo has a vertical resolution of 256 lines and an angular resolution of 0.1 degrees. It can see objects with only 10% reflectivity from 200 meters away. In addition, the package size is also much smaller. However, Innoviz still did not announce any details.
Similarly, Innoviz has not yet announced which Tier 1 suppliers will contract their new LiDAR.
At present, they already have a sample delivery plan, which is scheduled for the third quarter of next year. As for the formal mass production, it will not be until the autumn of 2023.
If they can achieve such performance at an ultra-low price, they will surely be able to take a lot of cake from the LiDAR market in the next few years.