Russell says he has been approached by a half-dozen competitors asking if Luminar would be interested in acquiring them. Because lidar sees in much greater detail than radar, it could make the cars capable enough to drive without that constant supervision. Current “semiautonomous” systems require the human always watch the road, because the radars on which they rely have trouble detecting things like stopped firetrucks. It’s for automakers who want to use lidar to let their customers take their eyes off the road a bit, as on divided highways. Companies like Waymo and Cruise are plenty capable of that classification work. What Russell calls “perception as a service” isn’t meant for those developing fully driverless vehicles. It also provides the software that takes the resulting “point cloud” of data and translates it into useful information: car here, truck there, pedestrian over yonder. That’s a reasonable aspiration, Russell says, because Luminar offers more than a hunk of hardware that shoots lasers into the world and measures how long they take to bounce back. Russell wants Luminar to be one of those suppliers, known as the Tier 1 companies, that sell directly to automakers-to compete with, rather than work with, the likes of Bosch and Continental. Being a component company-selling a widget to a major supplier, which then sells it to an automaker-won’t do either. Austin Russell may be just 24 years old, but he’s been helming his lidar laser scanner company since dropping out of Stanford at 17, and he’s no longer interested in running Luminar Technologies as a startup.
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