Chinese Tesla rival Xpeng will add lidar to their self-driving vehicles in 2021
- Xpeng will equip its electric vehicles with light detection and ranging systems next year to improve its autonomous driving technology
- Elon Musk says lidar is too expensive and not necessary, as Tesla’s self-driving technology relies on cameras and radar
Chinese electric car maker Xpeng is set to become the first passenger vehicle maker to add lidar sensors to mass-produced cars next year. The company announced on Friday the addition of the technology that could help improve the company’s autonomous driving efforts.
Lidar, short for light detection and ranging, is similar to radar but uses light instead of radio waves, offering higher precision in certain environments. The shorter waves also make it more ideal for imaging, offering better detail. However, the high cost led Tesla CEO Elon Musk to call the addition of lidar “a fool’s errand”.
The new vehicles will also come with several other hardware and software upgrades. These include millimetre-wave radar, ultrasonic sensors, a high-performance computing platform, and behaviour and motion prediction. Xpeng said the upgrades will offer a “nearly tenfold increase in computing power” and “centimetre-level accuracy”.
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In addition to adding lidar to future vehicles, the P7 could get a software upgrade for its self-driving autopilot function, starting in the first quarter next year, an Xpeng representative said. The company will announce later whether lidar will be added to P7s manufactured in the future.
While Musk spoke out against using the technology in 2019, his objections were more about cost than capabilities. “[They are] expensive sensors that are unnecessary,” he said at the time. Tesla, the prominent tech disrupter in the automobile industry, depends on cameras and radar for its own self-driving tech.
A fully functional rooftop lidar system from Velodyne, the world’s leading lidar developer, can cost as much as US$75,000, according to Wired magazine. But Velodyne President Marta Hall said in a 2019 interview with The Mercury News that the cost has fallen over time. Velodyne introduced a small US$100 lidar system in January that the company says “delivers the same technology and performance” as its more expensive systems.
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Hall also contradicted Musk on the necessity of lidar for autonomous driving. “Without lidar, the system is missing crucial 3D vision with 3D data points for collision avoidance and advanced autonomous navigation,” she said last year.
Some other companies developing autonomous driving systems are already using lidar. This includes Waymo, the Alphabet-owned company spun out of Google in 2016, which started selling its self-developed lidar systems last year.
Livox, a subsidiary of drone maker DJI, already offers a 32-channel lidar system for US$599.
Xpeng declined to say who is supplying its lidar systems or how much its vehicles will cost next year.
