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Comment by small_model

4 hours ago

Also 'Luminar Technologies, a prominent U.S. lidar manufacturer, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2025' LIDAR is useful in a small set of scenarios (calibration and validation) but do not bet the farm on it or make it the centre piece of your sensor suite.

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small_model

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StephenSmith  32 minutes ago

Also, MicroVision, the company in OP's article bought the IP from Luminar. This feels like a circular venture capital scam. Luminar originally went public via SPAC and made a bunch of people very wealthy before ultimately failing.

UltraSane  4 hours ago

This is very wrong. LIDAR scanners have revolutionized surveying by enabling rapid, high-precision 3D mapping of terrain and infrastructure, capturing millions of data points per second. LIDAR can penetrate dense vegetation, allowing accurate, ground-level, mapping in forested or obstructed areas. Drone mounted LIDAR has become very popular. Tripod mounted LIDAR scanners are very commonly used on construction sites. Handhels LIDAR scanners can map the inside of buildings with incredible accuracy. This is very commonly used to create digital twins of factories.

  • jcattle  3 hours ago

    And none of this is on the order of magnitude that consumer automotive would have.

    The EU requires every new car to have Autonomos Emergency Braking. If LiDAR becomes cheaper than radar, this is a potential market of millions.

UltraSane  4 hours ago

Lidar is critical for any autonomous vehicle. It turns out a very accurate 3D point cloud of the environment is very useful for self driving. Crazy, I know.

  • servo_sausage  4 hours ago

    Useful but not at all required. Camera + radar is sufficient for driving, and camera+ USS is fine for parking.

    Radar is just cheaper than the number of cameras and compute, it's also not really a strict requirement.

    Look at how the current cars fuck up, it's mostly navigation, context understanding, and tight manoeuvres. Lidar gives you very little in these areas