Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by grmarcil 3205 days ago
Not that anyone believes that this car is really going to production anytime soon, but as an additional datapoint: the car in the first image is sporting $40,000 worth of lidar on the roof (5 x Velodyne VLP-16).

I'm sure GM is getting a healthy discount off retail from Velodyne, but production-ready lidar is still eye-wateringly expensive by OEM standards. Some solid-state lidar units (Quanergy) out there in the hundreds of dollars (and one from Velodyne in the works for 2018 release), but the fact that Cruise is still using spinning Velodyne units suggests to me that solid-state lidar needs a few more generations to come up to par.