Luminar has refused to disclose why Tesla buys so many lidar sensors from it
May 8, 2024 at 10:07
- Tesla has already admitted to using lidar to verify its self-driving systems.
- The car manufacturer is likely to have purchased up to 2,100 lidar sensors in the first quarter.
- Elon Musk has previously said that companies using lidar for self-driving systems are “doomed to fail.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has criticized lidar sensors numerous times, but as it turns out, the electric car maker is the largest lidar customer of Luminar, a leading lidar technology company.
In a newly released quarterly earnings report, Luminar announced that Tesla was its “largest LiDAR customer in the first quarter,” accounting for more than 10% of the company’s first-quarter revenue. That represents about $2.1 million worth of sensors that Tesla purchased this year, helping to offset Luminar’s quarter-over-quarter sales decline.
Read: More and more car manufacturers are using lidar sensors, Tesla is not one of them
According to Auto News, Luminar declined to say what Tesla uses its lidar sensors for. The revelation comes just weeks after Tesla’s own quarterly earnings release, when Musk said its vision-only system was the best way to achieve full autonomy.
“It is obvious that our solution can enable self-driving with a relatively inexpensive inference computer and standard cameras,” he said. “No lidars, no radars, ultrasound. Nothing.”
The Verge reports that the average Luminar lidar sensor cost around $1,000, suggesting Tesla may have purchased up to 2,100 of them. Although Musk denies the importance of laser imaging technology, Tesla was spotted testing lidar on a Model Y prototype in May 2021, so it’s not as antithetical to the technology as Musk would like the world to believe.
The eccentric billionaire has been vocal about his disdain for lidar in autonomous vehicles for many years. In 2020, he claimed it was “fucking stupid” on cars and called it “expensive and unnecessary.” In 2019 he said: “Everyone relies on lidar [for autonomous cars] is doomed.”
“[They are] expensive sensors that are unnecessary,” he added. “It’s like having a whole bunch of expensive attachments. For example, an appendix is bad, but now that you have a whole lot of them, it’s ridiculous, you’ll see.”