Aeva, a maker of next-generation 4D LiDAR systems, announced on Tuesday a strategic collaboration with LG Innotek, an affiliate of LG Group, which will serve as a manufacturing partner. The partnership will help to bring Aeva’s technology to the mass market for both commercial and passenger vehicles.
The partnership includes a $50 million strategic investment by LG Innotek and is part of a larger non-dilutive investment for new product development. FreightWaves spoke with Soroush Salehian, co-founder and CEO of Aeva, about the deal and how the technology works.
Aeva is a perception systems company and has developed an innovative 4D LiDAR technology that measures both distance and velocity simultaneously. The 4D refers to the addition of velocity as a fourth dimension of measurement compared to traditional LiDAR systems. “It’s just like cameras went from black and white to color. That additional dimension of information is what we call the fourth dimension,” Salehian told FreightWaves.
Unlike conventional time-of-flight LiDAR that only measures distance, Aeva’s frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) technology detects both position and speed for every pixel it captures. This capability provides crucial information for autonomous systems, particularly in trucking applications where LiDAR is used to identify objects at distances of 400-500 meters, about four to five football fields away.
“In trucking, this is especially important,” Salehian explained. “Even if time of flight could see that object, you only get a few points at that distance. So what do you see there? You don’t know if that is one object, it’s three objects, it’s noise.”
The 4D LiDAR’s ability to capture velocity data enables faster decision-making in critical situations like traveling at highway speeds. According to Salehian, this technology can save seconds of decision-making reaction time, which is crucial in terms of trucks being able to come to a full stop at a safe distance.
Some estimates note it can take a semi-truck traveling at 65 mph around 525 feet or around five to six seconds to come to a full stop.
This is a deal years in the making. Salehian told FreightWaves the company has invested over half a billion dollars over eight years to create a unified perception platform that integrates LiDAR optics onto a chip.
Looking ahead, Aeva has secured a production agreement with Daimler Truck, which chose the sensing and perception systems maker as the supplier of its long and ultra-long range LiDAR for its series production autonomous commercial vehicle program.
As part of the agreement with Daimler Truck, the company aims to ramp up production capacity for 200,000 LiDAR units per year. Salehian told FreightWaves its North American LiDAR production will be USMCA-compliant.
A long-standing challenge for LiDAR makers has been cost, but with the focus on having the chip embedded in the hardware, it opens the door for lower costs.
Aeva aims to make the technology competitive with existing radar solutions. “Because we are able to integrate everything down on the LiDAR chip, we can reduce the number of components drastically,” Salehian noted, adding that the wafer-scale, chip-based technology allows for continued cost reduction as production volumes increase.
