A few days ago, Changan Brand Day revealed a message. In order to support a high-level autonomous driving layout, 36 sensors may be reserved for new cars in Changan in the future, including 6 millimeter-wave radars, 13 cameras and 12 ultrasonic radars, and the number of laser radars will reach as many as 5.

Five lidar? This configuration is too luxurious. At present, we can see that there are only a handful of mass-produced models loaded with lidar, such as the latest generation of Mercedes-Benz S-Class and Audi A8, which are the flagship models of luxury brands. Audi A8 uses Valeo's Scala? 1, and the latest generation of Mercedes-Benz S-Class uses Valeo's Scala? 2, but there is only one quantity. In addition, almost no other car companies use lidar on production models, because the cost of lidar is too expensive at present.

How expensive is lidar? First of all, there are three kinds of lidar, mechanical rotary, MEMS and pure solid state. At present, the mechanical lidar is used in the car, which meets the vehicle regulations and standards. It is also carried on Audi A8 and Mercedes-Benz S, and it is the most expensive one.

Uber self-driving test car, the roof is lidar.

As for MEMS and pure solid-state lidar, although these two costs have been reduced very low, such as iPhone? 12 uses solid-state lidar, but it can't meet the standard of vehicle regulations, so it is meaningless to discuss the price of MEMS and pure solid state. After all, the lidar we saw in the mass production and test cars are all mechanical.

For example, in the suburbs of Shanghai, you may see some self-driving test vehicles. Mechanical lidar is the kind of thing with a columnar roof. The mechanical laser radar forms a plane by arranging laser beams vertically, and rotates this plane by mechanical rotating parts, and emits laser beams, which are received by sensors and recorded as electrical signals, thus realizing 360-degree perception of the surrounding environment.

Willydon? 128? The 3D point cloud image of line lidar is as above, 64? This line is as follows

The number of lines of mechanical lidar is the number of vertically arranged beams, such as Scala of Valeo on Audi A8. 1 is a 4-wire Scala of Mercedes-Benz S-Class? 2 is the 16 line. The more vertically arranged beams, the greater the scanning density and the higher the accuracy of lidar. Of course, the more expensive the better, the highest wire harness can reach 128 line.

Now it is known that the 16 line Scala used by Mercedes-Benz S? The price is about 8000- 10000 dollars, so we can estimate how much the lidar on 128 line should be worth ... so I'm also curious about the appropriate price of Changan's new model with five lidar in the future.

In fact, regarding lidar, Musk once famously said that "only fools can use lidar", but this sentence is mainly because Ma thinks that the cost of lidar is too high, not that lidar is not easy to use.

Because lidar plays an important role in autonomous driving solutions, lidar is widely used in L3 and above autonomous driving technologies. Tesla's test vehicles have been photographed with lidar before.

Although Tesla has always claimed to take the visual perception route, so far, Tesla has had at least three crashes against white trucks. The reason is that under special circumstances, the camera+millimeter wave radar can not effectively identify white static objects.

Because the camera is difficult to use in places with complicated backlight or light and shadow, and it relies too much on algorithm, millimeter-wave radar has the advantage of speed measurement and distance measurement and does not choose working environment, but it is not suitable for pedestrian detection and target recognition.

The advantages of lidar are high-precision identification of targets, detection and tracking of dynamic obstacles and three-dimensional modeling of the whole environment, and its characteristics can just make up for the shortcomings of cameras and millimeter waves. Even with V2X's blessing for future autonomous driving, it is still safest to rely on lidar to identify obstacles that may appear unexpectedly in the traffic environment, so high-level autonomous driving in the future is bound to be inseparable from lidar.

At present, limited by the cost, although lidar can only be seen on high-level self-driving test vehicles, this situation will definitely change. With the continuous improvement of the level of autonomous driving, the demand for lidar will inevitably increase gradually, and the cost of lidar that can meet the vehicle regulations will also decrease. Therefore, it is extravagant to see Changan using five laser radars on new cars in the future, but it may not be surprising in the future.

For example, the self-driving company Verdun recently launched the first new solid-state lidar, with a price as low as $500. Of course, there is still a long way to go before getting on the bus. However, Huawei and DJI in China are also actively deploying vehicle-mounted lidar.

In addition to Chang 'an, Tucki, a domestic automobile company, also announced that it will install two laser radars on the top version of new models to be launched next year. In the future, a car-mounted lidar with a price of less than 1,000 yuan may not be an extravagant hope. At that time, after the lidar gets on the bus on a large scale, autonomous driving will inevitably change by leaps and bounds.

This article comes from car home, the author of the car manufacturer, and does not represent car home's position.