Lidar is a surveying method that measures distance to a target by illuminating the target with laser light and measuring the reflected light with a sensor. Lidar is a comprehensive light detection and measurement system. Compared with ordinary radars, lidars can provide high-resolution geometric images of radiation intensity, distance images, and speed images. At the beginning, they were mainly used in the military field. And now this technology has gradually penetrated into the consumer market. Especially in the field of unmanned driving, as Google, Baidu, Ford, Audi, BMW and other companies have successively adopted lidar sensing solutions, lidar has become an indispensable part of unmanned technology.

At present, lidar can be divided into mechanical scanning lidar and solid state lidar. Lidar can be divided into 2D, 2.5D (1, 4, 8 lines) and 3D (16, 32, 64 lines) products according to the number of lines. Development of driverless technology promotes growth of vehicle lidar market. Self-driving car is an intelligent vehicle. It is an automated vehicle that can partially or fully replace the driver's driving behavior, self-driving car is the highest form of smart car development. Unmanned driving consists of sensors, controllers and actuators, corresponding to the three functional modules of perception, decision-making and execution. The driverless industry chain includes: 1. Hardware components, including various sensors such as lidar, camera, integrated computing and processing platform, and traditional automotive components such as engine, body and integrated control bus; 2. Software components, including driverless operating systems (including sensing, planning, control, car interconnection, data platform interface, etc.), high-precision map data, etc. 3. Vehicle manufacturing. 4. Operational Services. At present, in the unmanned driving technology, lidar is mainly used for 3D modeling of the surrounding environment of a vehicle, obtaining depth information of the environment, identifying obstacles, and constructing a drivable area. With the further popularization and application of driverless technology, the driverless industry chain is developing rapidly, and lidar has benefited a lot as a mainstream sensor in driverless driving.

As one of the most important sensors in driverless technology, vehicle lidar is of great significance for ensuring the safety of driverless cars. With the further development of the driverless industry, the automotive lidar market has a bright future. Global vehicle lidar market was valued at 205 Million US$ in 2018 and is projected to reach 1036 Million US$ by 2024, at a CAGR of 31% during the forecast period. With the gradual popularization of driverless cars, the global vehicle lidar market will maintain rapid growth, With the advent of industrialization of driverless cars and the reduction of vehicle lidar costs in the future, it will jointly promote the explosive growth of the on-board lidar industry.

Key players in global vehicle lidar market include: Bosch, Continental, ZF, Denso, Delphi, Magna, Valeo, Velodyne LiDAR, LeddarTech, Quanergy, HELLA, Ibeo Automotive Systems etc.