- Welcome to CES 2021.

My name is Aaron Jefferson, VP of Product.

And I'm here today to talk to you about needs for speed,

enabling highway autonomy.

And I want to key in on that word speed.

Many of the systems today are limited

in terms of the ODD or the speed capability of the system,

whether it's Level 2 or Level 2+.

Those systems have the limited say,

sensing and perception technology

to enable you to take your hands off the wheel,

take your eyes off the road,

and really be able to drive autonomously.

First, let me give you a little background about Luminar,

some of our company highlights, that is.

So we came up with this really great

breakthrough technology for Lidar,

really enabling us to see long distance

high resolution sensing technology

to enable highway autonomy.

Our belief is that and our vision

is to make highway autonomy safe and ubiquitous,

safety being a key goal there,

and ubiquitous meaning available for all.

So if we look at overall,

our integrated autonomous and safety solution,

we are the world's first autonomous solution

for series production.

There are a lot of different activities for development

and spinning systems

that aren't really designed

to go into a vehicle for production.

From day one, our concept was development activity

leading to a production platform,

which includes all the aspects

of what it takes to qualify for automotive grade.

We're not just built on sensor technology.

We're also built on our software.

What our sensor does is really unlock,

I would say, a clarity of the environment

and the environmental space

more than any other sensor this out there.

But with that clarity,

you can take that information

and really develop software

and unlock features and capabilities

that have never been on the market before.

And the key thing is

you don't want to just provide the function or the feature,

but you also want to do it in a robust way

with great confidence.

And that's what our sensor delivers.

And then we have our top tier,

which is essentially the software stack

that enables the functionality.

Path, planning, and vehicle control.

We have the capability to develop that.

We're working with several partners to develop that.

And we work in conjunction with our tier one.

So it really just depends on the model

being used by our end customer,

but essentially, we are being built,

and we are partnering,

and we're developing a solution

that goes from the sensing

all the way to the full stack development

and releasing the function at a vehicle level.

Now, if you take a look at the market,

we like to look at it in two halves, I would say.

One is ADAS.

ADAS includes everything from Level 0, basic AEB,

all the way up to say,

the systems you see really on the market today,

Level 2, Level 2+ systems

where the driver still has to remain engaged,

maybe can take their hands off,

but their eyes always have to remain on the vehicle,

I mean, on the road.

What we've noticed in this space,

and if you look at the numbers on the bottom left there,

it hasn't really been effective

at reducing the number of fatalities.

Still over a million fatalities globally,

still tons, I think 50 million accidents.

And if you look at the United States in particular,

35,000 deaths on the highway every year.

And that's a real problem.

And that number has remained stagnant for a while.

Our belief is that with Lidar,

you can greatly improve the effectiveness of these systems

and really start to hit those numbers and knock those down.

The other half of the market is autonomous driving.

And autonomous really means driver out of the loop.

Anything under that is automated or ADAS.

For autonomous driving,

we are really looking at unlocking the capability

of allowing the driver to disengage

and do that in a safe manner,

meaning the vehicle knows what to do.

It can detect objects or threats well ahead of its path.

It can understand the maneuverability

and what it can and can't do.

And it has a redundancy in the safety behind it

to really deliver the capability.

So when we look at those two halves,

we say, okay, there's a really great opportunity

to greatly improve active safety.

And we call that proactive safety.

And then there's a,

I mean, we are the ones,

we believe, to unlock the autonomous space.

And we're really focused on Level 3 for a highway,

again, because once you get to the city

and you're talking Level 4 or 5,

and no steering wheels, and pedals, and brakes,

you get into a situation

where you have an extremely difficult ODD.

Over time, we believe that will be solved,

but the immediate benefit to an end consumer,

to someone buying a private vehicle is the highway autonomy.

So next, I would like to talk to you

about our industry leading performance.

We've talked a lot about unlocking autonomy

and it's important that we understand

in terms of where Luminar is

in relation to the rest of the market.

If you look at the graph to the right,

this will really explain how we founded

and designed our architecture from the beginning

we knew that the problem to solve

was high resolution at a long distance.

And we couldn't allow for that trade off.

If you look at the rest of the market,

and for a lot of reasons,

architecture selection, a solid state selection,

other things of that nature,

everybody has to make a trade off.

And what you don't see here is also a field of view.

There are some companies that can see really far,

say 150 meters.

However, their resolution is extremely low.

What that means is

if there are two objects out there 150 meters away,

they're gonna detect one

or they're going to highlight in their specifications

that they have a range detection of 150 meters.

But without the resolution,

it really doesn't make much of a difference.

Same way the other way.

If you were to say, hey,

I have the resolution, the high resolution.

I can detect two small objects separately from one another.

That's great.

But if you can only do that at 50 meters,

well, then I can do that with the radar.

So, do I need a Lidar in my system?

So, it's really important

that we provided the high resolution,

and the range, and also the field of view.

This just digs into that a little bit further.

I won't go into too much detail,

but essentially, if you look at the competition

and you look at what's required

to deliver into the market, right,

all these different factors play a part.

And if you're missing any of these,

it really does hinder your chances

at delivering the performance

and the say, automotive grade product

that the market needs.

And so this is just, again,

a deeper dive into that look.

Some of this, if you look at the competitors' side,

some of it's because of the selected 905 wavelength.

Some of it is because of the selected architecture.

And that really goes into why we selected what we did.

We built it from the standpoint

of what problem are we solving

and let's not make compromises around certain capability

that we know is gonna unlock the capability in the market.

Speaking of those architectures,

if you look at our system,

we really built things from the ground up

as was mentioned before.

If you look at our structure,

it is the scanning, the (indistinct), and the laser.

It's a very simple architecture,

again, that allows us to see

all the information that we need in a scene,

versus what we typically compare to

or have been compared to in the past

was a spinning Lidar,

which requires several lasers, several receivers.

And yeah, there's a ton of data there,

but there's a ton of cost associated with that.

And while that has developed some,

it still isn't an architecture

that will get you an affordable solution,

a robust solution in the market

that you can easily create an auto grade product

and then sell into the market.

It's one of the main reasons

you really don't see any spinning Lidar

in any production vehicles.

And it's also where we understood there were limitations

and we wanted to make sure

that we set up our architecture to solve the problem,

but also think about scalability,

think about cost,

think about manufacturability and production.

And we've done a really good job with that.

We really love this slide.

This is one of our favorite slides from my product group.

It is requirements that matter.

And essentially, what we want to explain to everybody

is everything on this page matters.

If you drop one ball here,

you essentially limit the chances

of your product being effective

and going into production.

The top row is really around performance.

You really want to bring that Level 3,

Level 4, hands off, eyes off value to the consumer.

You need that full top row.

Range, resolution, fidelity,

and the precision of the information,

the right field of view, the weather performance.

We need all of those pieces to work well.

What we're finding now is the bottom row,

when you really start

to get into discussions with customers,

you really start to explain to them what you have

and what you can deliver,

they also have a concern from the bottom row.

You know, how viable is your supply chain?

What's your manufacturing strategy?

Do you understand how to manufacture this

to where you can get yields that makes sense

and that will allow everybody

to feel safe about their product being developed?

Is it quality product?

Is it automotive grade?

You know, there are a lot of companies

that really focus on the performance

and a lot of companies fall short there,

and they're not even yet at the position

where they can think about the bottom row.

When you talk to the customers,

the premium OEMs, the volume OEMs,

every OEM that has

understands what it takes

to put a quality product into the market,

especially the automotive market.

That bottom row is just as important.

We were awarded a Volvo win.

And I want to be clear.

This Volvo win is a production award for SLP 2022.