From volume performance to volume cost, a new round of lidar has quietly opened.
On April 19th, Wesai released ATX, an ultra-wide-angle long-range lidar based on the fourth-generation chip architecture.
Although Wesai did not directly announce the specific price of the lidar at the press conference, according to its core target market, with a range of 150000 yuan on the order of 10 million, it can be speculated that ATX will compete directly with the medium-and long-range lidar MX, which was released by Suitengchuang just a few days ago.
On April 15th, Suiteng Juchuang released the new generation of medium-and long-range lidar MX on M platform.
According to the official introduction, the lidar mainly focuses on the 15-200000 yuan market, more specifically, it will be standard on 200000 yuan models and optional on 150000 yuan models.
According to the plans of the two companies, both Hesai ATX and Suiteng Juchuang MX will be mass produced in the first half of 2025.
Among them, ATX is expected to start mass production in 2025.
At present, it has obtained a number of mass production points, respectively from domestic leading car companies, leading new energy car companies, leading new forces, mainstream European and American joint venture car companies and other mainframe factories.
MX has also won three production deadlines, and the first one will also be mass-produced in the first half of 2025 and will sell for less than $200.
This means that as soon as next year, the car-borne lidar will officially enter the “thousand-yuan era.
” Source: Wesai Technology, Wesai released the new product ATX, farther, wider, higher definition, ATX.
It is easy to see from the naming that this is another new car-class lidar based on Wesai’s AT platform, which has hundreds of thousands of mature mass production experience.
Before this, there are also AT128, AT512 and so on from this platform, in which AT128, as the main production-class lidar at the present stage of Wesai, has delivered a total of 300000 sets.
Source: Hosai Technology, specifically, as a brand-new vehicle gauge-grade product, ATX has carried out multi-dimensional optimization in ranging, resolution, cost, etc.
, with a longer range, wider viewing angle and higher accuracy: the farthest detection distance of ATX is 300m, which is 50% higher than that of AT128.
the horizontal field of view angle is 140°, which is wider than that of similar products in the market.
It supports up to 256line scanning, and the best angular resolution is 0.
08 °x 0.
1 °, which is more than 2 times that of AT128.
This means that smart cars with ATX will be able to sense abnormal conditions such as vehicles and pedestrians in advance at higher speeds, thus enhancing their ability to cope with potential risks.
It is particularly worth mentioning that for AEB, in the view of Li Yifan, founder and CEO of Hesai Technology, the ranging capability of lidar will directly determine the safe speed limit of AEB.
“suppose there is a tire on the road 150m away.
If the lidar can detect 150m, there will be no problem braking at 130km/h speed, but if you can only measure 100m, the brake will definitely be later and the maximum speed limit will be lower.
” On the other hand, the wider horizontal field of view angle makes the forward vision of the vehicle wider, and the emergency congestion on both sides of the vehicle or complex road conditions such as pedestrians and non-motor vehicles can be sensed earlier, so as to improve the safety of auxiliary driving in urban areas.
In order to reduce the interference to lidar caused by rain, fog and other special weather, Wesai has also developed its own intelligent point cloud analysis engine (IPE).
According to Li Yifan, Wesai has developed an independent chip to analyze the waveforms before the point cloud is formed to identify various environmental noises.
It is reported that the Hesai IPE can filter out more than 99.
9% of the noise caused by rain, fog and dust, thus effectively reducing the misidentification and trigger of the system.
Taking into account the different requirements for ranging and detection range in urban and high-speed scenes, the Hesai ATX also has a 7x optical zoom.
If you compare a camera, it is equivalent to having both telephoto and wide-angle lens capabilities.
In this way, when driving in the urban area, the ATX can achieve an ultra-wide field of view of 140°, monitoring the road conditions on both sides of the body to the maximum extent.
at high speed, it can achieve super ranging up to 500m and 7x HD sensing through 7x optical zoom, further improving the ability to perceive the distant road conditions ahead.
It is worth noting that compared with AT128, although the core performance parameters of ATX have been fully upgraded, in terms of size, the volume of the whole machine has been greatly reduced by 60%, the weight has been reduced by half to 500g, and the exposed minimum window height is only 25 mm, which can support more flexible installation, such as roof, front windshield, inside headlights, etc.
, while reducing power consumption by 55% to only 8 W.
The fourth-generation chip architecture plays a key role behind the substantial improvement in the performance of Wesai ATX.
As we all know, the most important thing of lidar is the transceiver module.
The ranging ability, accuracy, point frequency, power consumption and volume of lidar all depend on the transceiver module.
The transceiver module is essentially an electronic component, that is, photoelectric conversion + complex signal processing module.
If some of the components are integrated together, the number of components can be greatly reduced, the product quality can be improved, and the lidar cost can be reduced at the same time.
It is precisely with this insight that in the past few years, lidar manufacturers, including Wesai, have devoted themselves to the innovation of lidar technology by developing their own chips.
The newly released ATX uses its latest fourth-generation chip architecture to improve the overall performance of products through multi-dimensional upgrades in architecture design, devices, manufacturing processes, materials and software algorithms.
The 4th generation chip architecture of Wesai adopts 3D stacking technology, which can integrate 512 channels on a single board.
A 2-core CPU,8 core APU,256 core IPE is embedded, which can realize 24.
6 billion samples per second.
With advanced devices and waveform processing capabilities, the sensitivity of the detector has been improved by 130%, and the power consumption of single point ranging has been reduced by 85%.
In addition, the platform based on this technology can also support intelligent functions such as all-solid-state two-dimensional electronic scanning, photon anti-jamming, intelligent optical zoom and so on.
Prior to ATX, Wesai released the 512-line ultra-high-definition ultra-long-range lidar AT512 at the beginning of the year, which is also based on the fourth-generation chip, which can achieve 300m standard range (@ 10% reflectivity), with a maximum range of 400m, and has a globally uniform 0.
05o x 0.
05° angular resolution.
The point cloud density is eight times that of AT128.
AT128 is based on the second-generation chip architecture.
It can be seen that if the lidar performance is doubled when compared with the AT128,AT512 which has been mass-produced, the lidar performance is doubled, while the ATX, the lidar cost is reduced by half with more focus performance unchanged.
This is also Wo Sai for Moore.
The law is applied to two concepts in the lidar industry: extreme performance and extreme cost.
In the end, no matter which path, it actually converges on a “soul torture” of lidar: farther, wider, smarter, cheaper? At present, through the release of ATX, Wesai has made an answer.
To bridge the gap and reduce costs is the only way.
According to the configuration data of Gaishi Automotive Research Institute, there will be a total of 549000 lidars in the domestic passenger car terminal market in 2023 (excluding imports and options, the same below).
Among them, Wesai Technology, Tudatong, Suiteng Juchuang and Huawei occupy the top four seats of Top10.
Last year, the installed capacity of lidar was 205000, 148000, 125000 and 65000 respectively, with a corresponding market share of 37.
3%, 27%, 22.
8% and 11.
8%, respectively.
However, judging from the level of models configured in the end market, new energy vehicles worth more than 150000 yuan are still the mainstream market, and the lidar penetration rate was close to 10% last year.
On the basis of this, Li Yifan believes that this year will be a key year for vehicle lidar to “bridge the gap”, that is, the penetration rate of new energy vehicles above 150000 yuan will reach 16%.
Once this critical node is passed, the vehicle lidar is expected to start another rapid ascent cycle.
According to the mainstream forecast of the market, it is generally believed that shipments of vehicle lidars in 2024 are expected to exceed 1 million, and Citic Securities even believes that shipments of vehicle lidars in 2024 are expected to reach the order of magnitude of 1.
5 million, an increase of 160% over the same period last year.
If the sales of new energy vehicles worth more than 150000 yuan can reach 6 million this year, it is possible to reach the above permeability level.
Photo Source: Wesai Technology, but the question is, if the installed capacity of 1 million vehicle lidars is to be reached this year, where is the other 500000 + increments? At present, the market of 15-200000 yuan is becoming the focus of competition among the major lidar manufacturers.
On the one hand, from the point of view of the lidar configuration market, the lower level has reached less than 200000 yuan.
For example, the Zero running C10, which just went on sale in early March, is equipped with the 530 Wisdom driver version of Wo Sai Technology AT128, and the price is as low as 168800 yuan.
It is not difficult to foresee that, with the further intensification of the price war in the car market, the whole vehicle factory has to promote the intelligent driving configuration, which will inevitably lead to the probe of the lidar configuration.
In other words, the next large-scale popularity of lidar, further cost reduction, sinking to the market of less than 200000 yuan is the only way.
Otherwise, more vehicle manufacturers may make a choice on lidar.
A few days ago, GAC announced the launch of a map-free pure visual smart driving system, which is planned to be loaded in 2026 to achieve high-level intelligent driving.
The news comes a day after Huawei also announced that it would adopt a pure visual autopilot scheme for the first time in its S7 model.
In addition, Weilai second brand Lodao, it is speculated that in terms of intelligent driving assistance, it will also not rely on lidar, using pure visual solutions.
On the other hand, from the current market structure of new energy vehicles, it still occupies the vast majority of the market share of less than 200000 yuan, especially the market of 15-200000 yuan, the proportion of sales is rising year by year.
According to statistics from the China Automobile Association, from January to February 2021, sales of new energy passenger vehicles under 200000 yuan accounted for 73.
1%, 70.
8%, 71.
2% and 75.
6%, respectively, of which 15.
3%, 16.
3%, 17.
1% and 19.
3% were sold at the price range of 15-200000 yuan, respectively.
This also determines that if the vehicle lidar wants to really enter the mainstream market, it must further reduce the carrying cost.
Source: Suiteng Juchuang, in fact, in addition to Suiteng Juchuang and Wesai Technology have successively released new lidar products for the market of 15-200000 yuan, Yijing Technology and BYD have also shown their determination to “keep down” the lidar price.
One of the technologies, as early as January this year, shouted the slogan “LiDAR equality, entering the thousand-yuan era”, and to this end released the long-range lidar ZVISION EZ6 for ADAS preload production.
According to the official introduction, through a high degree of chip and integration, the price of EZ6 is the first to break the boundary of 2000 yuan and enter the “1” era.
BYD is also promoting the self-development of lidar, and according to the information currently transmitted to the outside world, it is likely to trigger a more brutal “bloody battle” of lidar.
“BYD has strong advantages, such as lidar, if the market price is 3000 yuan each, we may only need a cost of 900yuan.
” It is understood that Wang Chuanfu, chairman of BYD, said so.
This means that lidar manufacturers have no choice but to cut costs.
But the problem is that even though there are already hundreds of thousands of shipments, the head lidar manufacturers are still losing money.
Next, under the more stringent cost reduction requirements, how to further achieve the balance between the market and profits will undoubtedly pose a greater challenge to the players on the track.
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