Here’s where you get quick, efficient news as the industry works to find the balance between cost and revenue to achieve a profitable growth.
Valeo announced two new major contracts for their third-generation lidar. Scala3 lidar has been chosen by a leading Asian manufacturer and a leading American robotaxi company. Valeo has now registered orders worth more than a billion euros for Scala3.
Chinese lidar sensor startup Hesai saw a big drop in their gross margin, from 52.4 to 30 per cent in Q4-2022, after shifting their focus to producing more affordable lidar sensors for production cars. Their shipments over the quarter rose to 47,515 units as Li Auto, a major client, ramped up delivery of their L8 and L9 models equipped with Hesai laser sensors. Hesai also supplies sensors to AV developers such as Baidu, one of Hesai’s major shareholders.
Speaking of the Chinese EV market, BYD has maintained strong growth heading into 2023 over a traditionally low season and amid China’s EV subsidy phase-out. A 31-per-cent annual growth is expected for passenger EV sales, to 8.5 million units this year—of which about 1.5 million will be premium EVs; that’s a lot of non-premium ones! Li Auto and Nio, both offering lidars for ADAS on premium cars, are expected to deliver around 23,200 and 12,300 vehicles respectively in their best-case scenarios for March, as delivery guidance for the first quarter reached 55,000 and 33,000 units.
In America, Cruise says their new Origin autonomous vehicle will help make robotaxi services profitable. With room for six passengers, it is slated for ride-hailing use starting later this year. It allows ride-pooling: trips of multiple customers with similar routes in a single vehicle. That will maximize the utilization of each vehicle and provide the ability to deliver rides cheaply at scale. Waymo’s similar vehicle is a Chinese Zeekr.
Back to Europe now, where Clevon and ZF are partnering to deploy driverless last-mile delivery services. The collaboration brings together Clevon’s Autonomous Robotic Carrier technology and ZF’s Scalar, the world-leading real-time AI-based fleet orchestration platform.
Flexible shuttles complement bus and train. Is this the solution to enable a life without a car in the countryside? In 2030, 200 million passengers are targeted in on-demand traffic, according to German railway (Deutsche Bahn) boardmember Evelyn Palla. These services should then provide every second kilometre of travel by Deutsche Bahn in rural areas.
Clevershuttle says the ‘everywhere shuttle’ can be feasible. In the first seven months, 35,000 passengers used the five minibuses in eleven municipalities in the district of Rosenheim, Germany, and the trend is rising sharply. Clevershuttle plans to double their current 18 on-demand systems in the near future, the contracts for which are already in place.
In the United States, Nuro is making strides in last-mile delivery with custom-designed electric delivery vehicles to operate in local communities in Texas; Arizona, and California. Nuro announced a USD $40m investment to develop two new facilities in southern Nevada—an end-of-line manufacturing facility and world-class test track—to commercialize and scale production of their third-generation autonomous vehicle. Nuro has partnerships with Domino’s Pizza; Kroger supermarkets, and FedEx.
Also in the U.S., TuSimple has announced their trucks have cumulatively driven over 10 million miles through testing; research, and freight delivery. TuSimple is known for achieving the world’s first fully autonomous, ‘driver-out’ semi-truck run on open public roads. TuSimple has operations in Arizona; Texas; Europe, and China.
