General Motors Acquires LIDAR Developer

[WadeTyhon]

http://gmauthority.com/blog/2017/10...veloper-to-bolster-self-driving-car-business/

“Strobe’s deep engineering talent and technology backed by numerous patents will play a significant role in helping GM and Cruise bring these vehicles to market sooner than many think.”

Another acquisition for GM regarding self-driving vehicles. A GM owned self-driving car service similar to Maven is obviously their goal.

With the industry moving towards EVs anyways, self-driving cars and a car sharing platform make a lot of sense. Especially since the Bolt is already one of the most popular cars on the current Maven service.

 

[Pushmi-Pullyu]

This is good news! Lidar tech is something that is probably going to be a requirement for fully autonomous cars. Using software to analyze camera images is too unreliable; the positive "ping"* a lidar or radar system gets from bouncing a beam off an object is a much faster (in terms of computer processing speed) and much more reliable way to detect range to an object.

I'm very glad to see that GM is moving in the right direction on this!

*(Not literally a "ping"; I'm making an analogy by comparison with sonar detection.)

 

[God]

As outstanding as this is, “Strobe’s deep engineering talent and technology backed by numerous patents will play a significant role in helping GM and Cruise bring these vehicles to market sooner than many think.” I guess the Cruise Automation hardware wasn't yet good enough? I totally believe AP2.0 will NOT be fully autonomous with an OTA and that hardware would be needed...

 

[WadeTyhon]

As outstanding as this is, “Strobe’s deep engineering talent and technology backed by numerous patents will play a significant role in helping GM and Cruise bring these vehicles to market sooner than many think.” I guess the Cruise Automation hardware wasn't yet good enough? I totally believe AP2.0 will NOT be fully autonomous with an OTA and that hardware would be needed...

Apparantly it was technically Cruise Automation who acquired Strobe... because Strobe claims to make the Lidar for significantly cheaper than other manufacturers. And I mean significantly. Cleantechnica says the price may be dropped as much as 99%! We will see about that...

 

[Pushmi-Pullyu]

Cleantechnica says the price may be dropped as much as 99%! We will see about that...

I'd be very skeptical of such a claim. A two orders of magnitude drop in price? Why would the company do that, even if it could? Dropping the price to ~half would be enough to create probably more demand than they could handle. Why throw away the extra profit margin, if they can get the orders?

I'd like to know more. My guess is that a far cheaper price indicates the units are quite limited in function in one or more fundamental ways.

 

[WadeTyhon]

Apparently Cruise is preparing for an event next month in San Francisco. Probably to showcase the latest version of their self-driving car.

I would love to see some more videos of the cars driving real time through the bustling environment of San Francisco!

It would also be great if they announced a rough time table for expanding their self-driving taxi service beyond employees... but that is probably still a ways away.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/31/gms-cruise-sets-special-self-driving-event-for-november-28/