RoboSense announced their nominated supply project with SAIC’s Rising Auto brand. Several models, such as the F7 and the IM LS7 are being equipped with RoboSense’s M series lidar. RoboSense has helped with the mass production and implementation of SAIC’s Xiangdao Robotaxi 2.0 driverless mobility services project. In addition, Shangqi Capital, an investment subsidiary of SAIC Motor, reached a strategic investment agreement with RoboSense.
Innovusion, and Cao Cao Mobility, a ride-hailing platform backed by Geely, have entered into a strategic cooperation. Innovusion’s high-performance lidar products entered mass production in 2022, with over 70,000 units delivered annually. The company holds a production capacity of 250,000 lidar units per year.
Ouster has filed a patent-infringement complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) against China’s Hesai Group and related entities. Ouster also filed a patent-infringement complaint against Hesai in a U.S. District Court. In 2019, Velodyne Lidar brought a patent infringement lawsuit against Hesai; Hesai settled for payment of millions of dollars upfront and ongoing royalties.
Luminar announced a partnership with TPK, a supplier to companies like Apple and Tesla. The partnership aims to build and operate a high-volume factory to meet growing demand in Asia. The company now boasts a global manufacturing footprint that includes the United States; Mexico; Thailand, and China. The new factory will initially be capable of producing up to 600,000 Luminar lidar sensors annually to support awarded programs from automakers, including Mercedes-Benz.
Innovusion’s Falcon lidar has won a prestigious Tech.AD Europe Award. Innovusion’s Falcon was chosen in the Perception & Sensing category. Falcon lidar can detect objects at distances up to 500 meters, and dark objects with 10% reflectance up to 250 meters. Engineered to be highly resistant to interference by the likes of sunlight, Falcon lidars are standard equipment for Nio’s ET7; EL7, and ET5 EVs.
Kodiak Robotics has introduced their fifth-generation autonomous truck hardware platform, with increased sensor redundancy. The company has relocated the front-facing Luminar Iris lidar and wide field-of-view camera in each of the mirror-mounted SensorPods™. The long-range sensor suite includes four ZF Full Range radars; two Hesai 360-degree scanning lidars; two Luminar Iris lidar sensors, and eight cameras. Kodiak has several partnerships including Ikea; Werner; Pilot, and Forward.
Great Wall Motor-backed autonomous driving solution developer Haomo released their new DriveGPT, a large model for autonomous driving. By introducing driving data to establish RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback) technology, DriveGPT continuously optimizes the cognitive decision-making model of autonomous driving. The first vehicle model using Haomo’s HPilot 3.0, the new WeyY Mocca, will soon be available on the market. The company has already signed nomination supply contracts with three major automakers.
Navya announced the decision of the Court of Lyon, to sell its assets for €1.4m to Gaussin, through a joint venture with the Japanese group Macnica. Gaussin has developed a trailer tractor for logistics warehouses, which they sold to Amazon and UPS. Macnica is developing semiconductors and network-related software and hardware, and has many customers in the automotive field.
Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said the company is on track for to reach $1bn in revenue by 2025. Since June, Cruise has a commercial fleet of 150 modified Chevrolet Bolts in San Francisco. The vehicles are said to be designed for robotaxi use, though they haven’t been free of problems. Cruise will need 5,500 to 6,000 vehicles operating every day to achieve their $1bn revenue target by 2025, according to calculations by Sam Abuelsamid, a research analyst at Guidehouse Insights. That assumes Cruise is operating in 10 cities with 550 to 600 vehicles in each location, he said, with fares of about $2.50 per mile.
Zeekr Intelligent Technology, the company behind Geely’s Zeekr brand, signed a strategic cooperation memorandum of understanding with Intel for the development of automotive hardware products, intelligent in-car applications and solutions, as well as the ecosystem construction. Zeekr will collaborate with Mobileye, with a goal to deliver the world’s first autonomous vehicles with L4 capabilities by 2024.
