The controversy over lidar has never stopped.
Recently, as the world's leader in auto parts, Bosch announced that "due to technical complexity and time to market, it will not invest more resources in the development of lidar sensors."
In addition, from the perspective of the global market, except for the Chinese market, which is still actively promoting the introduction of lidar into cars, most other countries and regions have not shown similar high demand, although car companies including Mercedes-Benz and BMW are still promoting L3 The implementation of level 1 autonomous driving.
For traditional Tier 1 companies like Bosch, the top priority is to catch up as soon as possible with the leading advantages of local Chinese car companies and smart driving solution providers in the high-end smart driving market based on domain control architecture.
Currently, the high-end intelligent driving 3.0 platform (Wave3) independently developed by the Bosch China team (with the participation of WeRide Zhixing) is scheduled to be mass-produced in September this year. This project also determines to a certain extent whether Bosch can keep up with the dividends of China's high-end intelligent driving market. window.
At the same time, according to the plan, Bosch will transfer resources used for lidar research and development to other technologies such as millimeter wave radar (for example, 4D imaging). However, Bosch still believes that lidar technology is important for autonomous driving and will continue to seek the implementation of integrated solutions (Bosch is also a shareholder of Hesai).
So, how expensive is the research and development of lidar?
According to Hesai Technology’s public data, the company’s research and development expenses in the second quarter of 2023 were RMB 161 million, an increase of 49.1% compared with the same period in 2022. As a manufacturer that currently ranks high in shipments of pre-installed lidar in the Chinese market, the company continues to suffer losses.
The year-on-year increase in R&D expenses was mainly due to the increase in the number of R&D personnel and corresponding salary expenses, stock incentives and other expenses. Data shows that the company's R&D investment from 2019 to 2022 was 150 million, 230 million, 368 million and 555 million yuan respectively.
Judging from the current delivery volume of lidar in China's passenger car market, a total of 173,300 units (standard configuration) were delivered from January to June this year, and the average monthly delivery is still less than 30,000 units.
Considering that most car companies still do not have the ability to equip all series with lidar as standard, especially since the sales of models above 300,000 yuan account for less than 20% (the overall new car market), the ceiling effect is prominent.
At present, most lidar companies are seeking more market expansion, aiming at more business opportunities such as railways, industries, and mobile robots. The reason is that the low gross profit of hardware in the automotive pre-installation market is not good for lidar companies.
For example, from 2019 to 2022, the gross profit margins of Hesai Technology's lidar products will be 70%, 57%, 53% and 39%, respectively. According to the company, the decline in gross profit margin was mainly due to the increase in shipments of lower-priced ADAS lidar products.
Data shows that Hesai delivered 73,889 ADAS lidar units in the first half of this year (accounting for nearly 90% of the company's total shipments), achieving the highest operating revenue and total lidar shipments in history.
However, in the second quarter of this year, Hesai's net loss was still as high as 74.4 million yuan, and the net loss in the same period in 2022 was 69.7 million yuan; at the same time, some customers' shipments were delayed.
Similar problems are not isolated cases.
As a supplier of lidar components, Juguang Technology disclosed that due to the lower-than-expected progress of the lidar macro industry and the impact of the sales of related supporting models, the delivery volume of the company's customer (Continental Group Flash LiDAR) in the first half of the year was lower than expected.
The company said that the current overall market environment has changed a lot, and overall this year's delivery volume may be insufficient compared to expected. In addition, some lidar companies that have not entered the pre-installation market have also reported layoffs and significant cost reductions.
For lidar, the introduction of 4D imaging millimeter wave radar is also a hidden risk factor. According to the monitoring data of the Gaogong Intelligent Automotive Research Institute, the standard configuration of NOA vehicles below 300,000 yuan is still mainly cameras + millimeter wave radars.
This week, Mobileye announced that it has reached a strategic cooperation with Valeo. Based on its self-developed 4D imaging radar chipset and corresponding software and algorithms, Valeo will lead the system design of new imaging radar products.
Mobileye is seeing high interest in its imaging radar as automakers look to expand the operational design domain (ODD) of their autonomous driving capabilities, according to an official statement. At the same time, Valeo also identified strong market demand for imaging radars that achieve optimal performance.
Behind this, it comes from car companies' control over the cost of the overall smart driving system .
For example, from the data point of view, among the three current ideal models, the L9 Max has made the greatest contribution to Hesai, with a delivery volume of 42,500 units in the first half of this year, and the other two models (equipped with lidar versions) are both around 16,000 units.
The official launch of the LiDAR L9 Pro (non-lidar version) on August 3 will also have a certain adverse impact on Hesai’s ADAS product shipments in the second half of the year. For example, the delivery ratio of Pro+Air and Max versions of Ideal L8 and L7 is around 5.5:4.5.
In addition, Volvo Cars, which is about to implement lidar as standard equipment on its flagship SUV EX90, has also recently disclosed that many new cars in the future for the mid- to low-price market will no longer provide standard equipment in order to reduce costs.
At the same time, from the perspective of car company R&D, the current selection of lidar and 4D imaging radar is still in the early verification stage. This point has more say for ideal cars that have already implemented these two sensors on the car.
Previously, in a public interview, Lang Xianpeng, vice president of intelligent driving of Li Auto, said that lidar currently has two main functions: first, safety redundancy at night; second, truth value annotation of sensory samples. "Whenever these two functions no longer exist, they can be removed."
In his view, if the lidar can be removed, car companies would like to reduce this large BOM. "However, 4D radar is not very effective at present because the resolution is too low. We have not publicized it too much and still regard it as a normal radar to meet the functions of the car."