Tesla was Luminar’s biggest Lidar customer in Q1, is it for Robotaxi?

Tesla was Luminar’s biggest Lidar customer in the first quarter of 2024, reveals the lidar maker. The Electric Vehicle (EV) company has left this technology behind in its cars, so would it be used for Robotaxi?

The Orlando-based lidar maker reported $21 million in revenue in the first quarter with a 45% year-over-year (QoQ) increase. However, it declined 5% quarter on quarter (QoQ). The company says its quarterly decline is based on lower sensor sales to non-automotive customers.

However, Tesla helped to offset the sales as the largest Lidar buyer in Q1 comprising more than 10% of the revenue in the first quarter. That makes it contribute more than $2.1 million in revenue to Luminar. This is a big chunk of Lidar’s purchase for a company in the first three months of this year.

Tesla Vision:

That makes the topic more interesting because Tesla has transitioned cars from Lidar to a camera-based Vision system. It started in 2021 when Tesla removed radar from Model 3 and Model Y. Model S and Model X joined the transition in 2022.

The EV company says the vision system works better and is highly secure than a radar system. In the same year, Tesla also removed ultrasonic sensors (USS) from Model 3 and Model Y followed by Model S and Model X in 2023.

USS was replaced by a vision-based occupancy network, which caused Tesla to disable key features that relied on radar including auto park and summon. It took 3 years for the company to bring them back recently and achieve performance parity with USS.

Musk’s comments

Another aspect of this news leads to the Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, who openly criticized the use of Lidar technology in the past and called it old school compared to the vision system.

“Lidar is a fool’s errand. And anyone relying on Lidar is doomed” Musk said in 2019.

Robotaxi:

There is no confirmation on Tesla’s plan with this Lidar purchase but it might be related to the upcoming Robotaxi project. Tesla will unveil a prototype in August this year and Lidars are key to these autonomous public mobility cars.

It is a possibility that Tesla may be creating a stock of these lidars to put them in Robotaxi and not cars. However, there’s no official statement available on this deal between Tesla and Luminar.

(source)