GM buys Strobe, a Pasadena startup that makes crucial tech for self-driving cars

Last week, General Motors Co. announced plans to release a fleet of new electric vehicles by 2023, laying the groundwork for an "all-electric future." On Monday, the automotive giant revealed that it has bought Strobe, a Pasadena startup that produces the laser-based imaging technology known as lidar. Lidar uses a pulsed laser sensor to measure the distance between objects and is a crucial component of autonomous vehicles' navigation systems. But the technology's high price, complexity and limited performance has kept self-driving cars from being deployed on a larger scale, according to Kyle Vogt, chief executive of Cruise Automation, a subsidiary developing self-driving technology that GM bought last year. "To solve these problems we've acquired Strobe, a company that has quietly been building the leading next-generation lidar sensors," Vogt wrote in a blog post announcing the purchase of Strobe.