#Luminar ceo drivers
#Luminar ceo software

The public landmark example of this being realized is with one of our partners, Volvo, which has announced that their next-generation consumer vehicle platform (of which its models are based off) will be powered by Luminar lidar hardware as well as software in series production for highway autonomy applications, with a longer-term opportunity to simultaneously enable Luminar based proactive safety systems as standard on all vehicles. This market is high barrier-to-entry, high barrier-to-exit, and something that we’ve been successfully capitalizing on first by being designed into OEM autonomous development fleets, with the ultimate industry goal of achieving series production.

#Luminar ceo drivers

The third point about difficulty in urban environments became self-evident as current self-driving technology companies are more on track for 2030 than 2020 timelines to remove backup drivers and scale across cities, having overestimated advancements in software/AI to solve the problem with limited quality of data from legacy lidar.Īs you may have gathered, this wasn’t a huge surpise to us – which is why early on we invested heavily in working with the existing $3 trillion consumer vehicle and commercial trucking market by partnering directly with OEM’s, starting with a less-complex highway autonomy use case, as well as advancing legacy (re)active safety systems with autonomous features (what we’re calling Proactive Safety). We were able to do this by starting from a ‘clean slate,’ building our own components from scratch over the past eight years, in stark contrast to other lidar R&D efforts that use arrays of off-the-shelf parts. The first two were debunked because Luminar has uniquely developed the only lidar system to meet the 250-meter range and camera-like resolution requirements to see even the hardest edge cases, such as low-reflectivity ‘dark objects’ or a child out on the road ahead. Today, none of these assumptions have proven true. The rationale was: (1) sensing systems that cost tens of thousands of dollars needed to be amortized with ride-hailing as opposed to on consumer vehicles, (2) there was no lidar that could meet the long-range high-resolution performance required for high-speed highway driving as compared to low-speed urban driving, and (3) autonomously navigating city environments would be a straightforward problem despite the massive complexity and ‘edge cases’ in dense urban settings.

Just a few years ago, the predominant assumption was that urban ride-sharing robo-taxis would be the de-facto way autonomy is realized in a city near you by 2020, which resulted in an explosion of companies focused on R&D in this domain. We’re seeing substantially increased interest and realization of the disruption occurring throughout the industry, catalyzed first by consumer vehicle electrification, and soon to be by consumer vehicle autonomy.įor many, the question of how and when autonomy will successfully transition out of R&D and into the real world has been outstanding for some time now. Now, automotive companies, the supply chain, and even consumers are all forced to take a step back from the normal day-to-day as we glimpse into the future of transportation. For the past century, traditional automotive companies have largely competed with the same types of companies that source the same commodity white label products from the same traditional suppliers.

Through the changes brought on by COVID-19, the larger automotive industry is facing an accelerating inflection point in its history. At Luminar, we’re all incredibly passionate and committed to fulfill our vision to make autonomous transportation safe and ubiquitous.

We think differently with bold and novel ways of solving problems, we’ve invented breakthrough autonomous technologies from the chip-level up, and now we are partnered with the majority of major automakers to realize the change we want to see in this world. “Think differently.” “Be the change you want to see in the world.” “The future cannot be predicted, but it can be invented.” These are the quotes that have resonated with me for as long as I can remember, and all three of them came into play when I founded Luminar.