CES 2018: Waiting for the $100 Lidar

For the past decade, the easiest way to spot a self-driving car was to look for the distinctive spinning bucket mounted to its roof. The classic lidar design pioneered by Velodyne spins 64 lasers through 360 degrees, producing a three-dimensional view of the car's surroundings from the reflected laser beams. That complicated and bulky set-up has traditionally also been expensive. Velodyne's US $75,000 lidar famously cost several times the sticker price of the Toyota Priuses that formed the nucleus of Google's original self-driving car fleet. Those days are long gone.