It also means Velodyne faces new competition almost daily, facing today's competitive landscape and Velodyne's main competitive advantage is the long history of investing in the industry.
Look forward to becoming a bilateral arms supplier role in the self-driving race
According to The Verge website, there are currently 30 projects in progress for Velodyne, many of which are registered with the California Department of Vehicle Administration (DMV) and are currently competing with the Silicon Valley technology industry by traditional Detroit car manufacturers , Velodyne plans to become the arms supplier role on both sides of the race.
Even so, Velodyne is still facing competition issues in the industry. For example, Toyota, the world's largest automaker, recently announced it will collaborate with Luminar, a startup that launches a test vehicle to launch its products. Volkswagen, the world's second-largest automaker, In the light of technology and Valeo also form an alliance; General Motors (GM) has just announced the acquisition of light start-up Strobe.
At the same time, including Alphabet, Uber and China Baidu are also trying to prove that the next era of automotive technology breakthrough will come from the technology sector. Others such as NVIDIA and Intel are also developing software based on artificial intelligence (AI) Technology's self-driving solutions have also recently continued to announce that startups have made the financing to create Guangda Technologies.
However, in the face of emerging competitive challenges, industry analysts believe that large OEMs tend to trust suppliers that have long-term relationships with Velodyne in terms of market entry, given that Velodyne has a long history in Optical Have a big advantage.
But Velodyne's technology path will have to evolve radically, as automakers have previously developed their own drive platforms with Velodyne, but now carmakers want mass production, which means automakers must dramatically reduce Light up to cost and size, and can mass production.
Low-cost, small volume will be the key to competition
So how to roll out a lower cost and smaller form factor is a key to capturing the favor of automakers Velodyne first sold to other competitors in 2007 at a price of up to $ 80,000 Bulky, weighing over 50 pounds (about 22.58 kg).
Since then, Velodyne has managed to develop a smaller and less costly photoda, which is now sold by Velodyne as a 16-channel VLD-16, which has been reduced to $ 7,999 and weighs less than 2 pounds. The distance is up to 100 meters.
However, even though the selling price of VLP-16 has been reduced by 90% over the sales price of Velodyne's first-generation optical goods, the nearly $ 8,000 price is still relatively high for most consumer-oriented vehicles and not conducive to the introduction of general consumption at this stage Sex car market.
In addition, the quality of light at this stage has not yet reached the level of industry requirements, the majority of consumers to buy a car held for more than 10 years, but most OEMs claimed that there are problems with the mechanical scanning of light, up to 6 percent of the proportion Need to be sent back to the manufacturer for recalibration.
As Velodyne continues to expand its operating scale, it will also help reduce its production costs and prices. For example, Velodyne launched Velarray, a new solid-state photonics product in December 2016, and hopes to significantly reduce the cost of solid-state photonics. In the future, mass production and hope Key components can cost less than $ 50, allowing automakers to deploy solid-state light to every corner of the car.
Velodyne to do a full set of services Guangda manufacturers
Velodyne is also hoping to build in the future not only for self-driving light, but also in other fields including agricultural drone, safety robot, golf cart, etc., as long as the cost is reduced successfully, but as of December 2016 So far, Velodyne has not released the finished product for the market yet.
Some employees at Velodyne said that the company's internal resources have redirected to high-end rotating light, which is still too early for the press conference to celebrate solid state light at the end of 2016. However, if Velodyne dragged too long to launch solid-state light, there would be no other competition His first step was to unveil solid-state light products, and Hall took it lightly that Velodyne was to become a full-service light company, and solid-state light was just one of them, and he still liked the original spinning design.
Today, Velodyne has gradually expanded its size and has more than 400 full-time employees with annual revenue of several hundred million U.S. dollars. This is the reason that after five product categories and many wrong turns, Velodyne has gradually established its direction of development. Previously, Baidu and Ford et al. 150 million US dollars financing, and from the automotive and semiconductor industry to find a professional veteran, just today's situation.