Luminar's New Lidar Could Dominate the Self-Driving Car Market

Self-driving cars are nearly ready for primetime, and so are the laser sensors that help them see the world. Lidar, which builds a 3-D map of a car's surroundings by firing millions of laser points a second and measuring how long they take to bounce back, has been in development since 2005, when a guy named Dave Hall made one for the Darpa Grand Challenge, an autonomous vehicle contest. In the decade-plus since then, if you wanted a lidar for your self-driving car, Velodyne was your only choice. Yet Velodyne's one-time monopoly has eroded in recent years, as dozens of lidar startups came to life, and robocar makers found their own way. Google's sister company Waymo put years and millions of dollars into developing a proprietary system.