Toyota's Self-Driving Cars Get New Lasers to See the World

Renting out a 100,000-square-foot San Francisco cruise ship terminal feels ostentatious, even for a Silicon Valley coming out party. But Luminar, a small company dedicated to a far corner of the nascent autonomous vehicle industry, and its 22-year-old founder, Austin Russell, happily shelled out the $20,000 day-rate to rent Pier 35. Not for a fun or lavish celebration--in fact, there are only about six of us gathered in the cavernous building--but because it's one of the few places in the city big enough to demonstrate the power of the lidar system Russell has spent the last five years creating. A system that Toyota, a major carmaker with rapidly expanding self-driving car ambitions, says it plans to adopt for use in its vehicles. Standing at one end of the empty building, Russell hands me a pair of binoculars and points my gaze to a 30-by-30-ish square of black posterboard, resting on an easel 200 meters away.