EP22: Hawkwind & The History of Lidar

• Hawkwind -Master of the Universe
• An Introduction to Lidar, by someone who can’t remember what the acronym stands for
• Wisk, the flying car people
• Tristram Shandy
• The Presenter, Rafael Fors
• Data point capture and the measure of the rate of progress. 44k to 12.5 million is the corrected, key data point I got wrong (go me!)
• J saw the rise of Nvidia coming, thanks to researching robot cars
• David Beckham’s football boot as a metaphor, Valeo is the boot not the player
• Top Trumps slide on the performance
• Foxconn and the coming Chinese EV invasion
• Valeo Scala 3
• Hawkwind – Moonglum (chorus)
• Audi’s 15 year built in obsolesense
• Hawkwind – Spirit of the Age
• A digression on Audi’s fake exhausts
• BMW design has badly lost it’s way
• Hawkwind – The Right to Decide
• Hawkwind – Psy Power
• Scala 2’s wash wipe looks like the ones on J and M’s 1990 Ford Sierra Ghia
• A stupid question?
• Waymo a user?
• Hawkwind – Moonglum (solo)
• Conclusions: the true value of Lidar, and a prediction of flying cars
• Hawkwind – Spirit of the Age

[00:00:00] John Summers is the motoring historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider hailing from California. He collects cars and bikes built with plenty of cheap and fast and not much reliable on his show. He gets together with various co hosts to talk about new and old cars, driving motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.

Good day. Good morning. Good afternoon. It is John Summers, the motoring historian. So this is another one of those ones where I’m on my own and, um, and I’m talking about something a bit more serious than I might do when I usually prattle on with, uh, with Mark Gamow on most of these things. So obviously, I’m not going to, like, stay on topic like I was some kind of serious guy, but I’m at least [00:01:00] going to, going to try and be a bit informative here.

Um, so the topic is Lidar. And, and the presentation was, was by Lio, who according to like a scan, like under five seconds of research on Google, are like the third largest leader, pro provider, and, and, um. Maybe you don’t know what LIDAR is, so I can’t remember what the acronym stands for, but, but fundamentally, it is a way that autonomous cars are going to use to perceive the world.

And I guess the, uh, uh, thing to understand is that autonomous cars going to perceive, perceives the world in a variety of different ways, right? It has radio, it has radar, it has cameras, it has, you know, GPS, it has all of these different things. And then, you know, so just like us, it has, you know, it can see, it can hear, it [00:02:00] can, well, lidar is one of those senses.

And I guess what’s interesting is Elon Musk rejects it and says, you don’t need it. The other makers have it. I don’t know this for sure, if you were within the industry, this is one of the things you would definitely know for sure, but from the outside looking in, based upon this one presentation that I went to, it would seem as if the driver for Lidar development is automotive and therefore, you know, autonomy and, uh, the, each of the leading German makers has their own Lidar maker who they’re in bed with.

That’s the way to think about it. So, in other words, Mercedes are partnered with one company, BMW with another, and, and Volkswagen, Audi with, with, with another. It amused me that when the guy was talking about where their factory was someplace, Vemking or something like that, but [00:03:00] he described it as being 2 hours from Ingolstadt or an hour from Ingolstadt, either way, you know, it was, it was like, everything was, you know, in the year of our, in the year of Audi.

2024 kind of thing, a bit like a brave new world when they swear by Ford. This bloke’s is, is he was structured in a by Audi kind of way. And the first application for, for this bloke’s, uh, Lidar was, was the, the Audi A8 in 2017. But no doubt I will, uh, we’ll see. We’ll move on to that afterwards. So, so what was it that I’d gone to and how had I got invited to it?

Well, um, it was a society of automotive engineers event. I was invited to it by a guy who, um, was associated with the revs program back when there was a revs program at Stanford sort of 10 years ago, something like that. Um, so I, I met him at that time and I’m not really sure how I stayed on his mailing list, but I stayed on his mailing list and I get invited to, to interesting events.

[00:04:00] Um, The upcoming one is, is with WISC, these people who are doing flying cars or jet packs or something like that, and apparently they’re going to tell us how they’re going to overcome the legal hurdles, which should be, that should be a good story, even if it’s not true. It’s like a story you hear from a bloke in the pub, even if it’s a load of bullshit, you know, it’s going to be super entertaining.

Or maybe it’s not going to be super entertaining, but I think in the past these things when I’ve been to, they have been, and this LIDAR event, see look I’ve digressed, I’ve tried to be you people that, you people that signed up to this thinking I’m gonna get some really good information on LIDAR, thinking who’s this prattling bloody idiot, I’m sorry Tristram Shandy.

Wiki up the book Tristram Shandy and then you’ll understand the style of my pod if you’re not familiar with it looks like this hapless bloke who who presented to us was this chap, uh, Raphael force, um, I say hapless. Actually, he was very skilled. I dare say he was Italian or [00:05:00] Spanish. He had a, uh, a very, uh, Uh, you know, he’s one of those people who just knew what clothes to wear to make him look good.

Good kind of thing. And he had a really nice way of deflecting, um, the kind of question that he must have had a million times before about about price. So when they said to him, you know, where he was crowing on about how clever the technology was, and people were like, that must be. Bloody expensive. He responded by, by saying, well, it was all about value.

But he had some like little laugh and joke before he made the, the value play. So he was there with a couple of his, his people, one of whom had a twirly mustache and only intervened when the conversation needed to go three levels deep on the engineering and, and the engineering and the science at that point.

Um, Boggled my mind. The particular detail that he needed to help us with was how he was describing how the latest technology was able to pick up a single photon of light, [00:06:00] which, uh, uh, boggled my mind anyway, whatever, right. So I I’m involved in it through Stanford. It was in Palo Alto. It was some little light research house thing.

I I’ll maybe include a photo, whatever I arrived. I, I guess I was in Palo Alto a bit early. So I. I’ve sat in a bar for a bit, and that really, um, not only for a single beer, I just, that isn’t to add, but that really may put me in a relaxed frame of mind to learn about some new technology, but learn about it in this unique, perspective as a sort of contemporary historian that I, that I try and have, um, it’s, it’s, I think it was William Gibson, the writer who said, you know, the, the, the future is now, it’s all around us.

You just have to look carefully for it. It’s just, you know, it’s not reached everywhere yet. Um, and, you know, I, I definitely feel that that’s true of, of people and ideas and things that I’ve bumped up against in Stanford in the past. And that’s why I [00:07:00] float around the environment now. And that’s why when they invite you to a presentation called evolution of the first automotive grade of Lidar, you think to yourself, well, all right, you know, this is a little bit like, you know.

country houses of the late 19th century, or, you know, Roman emperors of the early 200s, isn’t it? It’s that kind of, of, has that kind of feel about it. So I just said, uh, when I rocked up, I was one of the first to rock up, um, and there are only about half a dozen people there, but there were probably about 20 or 30 people there by, by the, uh, by, by the end of it.

In presenting, Raphael positioned himself by, by saying, I still call myself an engineer. And the way that he was able to handle the questions, I definitely, he was, but he was one of the single, he was far more polished than any sales engineers I ever, I ever worked with, with, within my, in my career. And, and, um, he didn’t position it [00:08:00] like this, but I got the impression that he’s just basically the country leader for, for, for value.

And really, what does that mean in, in this country? If your business is in Germany, fitting bits to Audis. Um, well it’s people, isn’t it? And, and all of the car makers have people in Silicon Valley in order to sort of mingle and meet people. And just, uh, so, so, you know, when I, uh, we happen to be in line for the, uh, Pissoir, he and I, uh, I struck out, we, you know, we struck up a conversation.

Um, and you know, his interest in, in you is, is what brings you here. So what, what brings me here, that contemporary history piece, we just. We just talked about, so yeah, so the first application was the Audi A8 and maybe this is the, the early stat before I, you know, take go deep as it were the, that early first gen could [00:09:00] pick up 44, 000 points of data every second, the one that they’re just launching can do two, it’s editor John.

It was 44, 000 to 12 and a half million every second. What that translates to when they had this as a demonstration going all the time, so they had the lead our device up in the corner of the room and it basically looks like a, it looks like a slightly oversized valentine one or, you know, escort radar detector.

You know, about the size of a novel with that sort of black radio kind of screen on it that you would, you know, like an old fashioned remote TV remote control used to have. Um, so that’s like looking at us and there’s a big screen and on the big screen, there’s a representation of us. i. e. it’s picked up these data points and this is what it can can picture with us.

So, um, [00:10:00] 44, 000 to 2. 6 million. What does that mean in, in real money? Shitty dot matrix versus actually A clear picture of what’s happening. I’d say like 480p resolution. That’s what you would. So it looks like film, just not very good resolution. So look, that’s how far we’ve come. And that gives you a, an idea of how far we’re going to go.

But whilst I’m just doing this sort of top line thing, this leads me to, um, my sort of deeper perspective. The philosophical point about it, which is that everything that we’re going to talk about here is the, the seeing device, but of course, where is all of these 2. 6 million data points going every second well to the computer brain and what’s driving the computer brain?

Well, in video, in video, you know, I’ve, I’ve got. I guess one of the motorcycles that I have as [00:11:00] a collectible piece out of a very token investment in NVIDIA, which happened when I guess the price fell below 120 at one time. And I thought, wow, this is clearly seeing value because every time I did any research about autonomous cars in the valley, the brain driving it was NVIDIA.

To an extent that I actually was wandering around Stanford, have a. A lab called the used to be called the Volkswagen automotive innovation lab is right on the edge of campus. Anyway, I was wondering around there. I had a presentation. I was wondering around there and I got talking to one of the engineers.

They can’t remember. There was an official presentation and we were talking about, um, how they were doing. Um, they were using. You know, the brain that they were using to combine together all of these different feeds of information, the radar, the visual, the camera, the GPS to help the car make a decision in real time whilst [00:12:00] it’s speeding down the freeway at 70 miles an hour.

The brain that was doing that compute for once wasn’t an NVIDIA piece. And I asked why, and they were, they were like, because, uh, You know, AMD have lobbed a ton of cash our way. I can’t remember if it was AMD. I may have spoken out of turn then. I can’t remember if he named the chip maker. I may have just said AMD because I don’t know chip makers or that field, um, particularly, uh, particularly well.

But anyway, look, I’m digressing down a rat hole. The point is the. The center of this is the computing power, which helps the car make decisions. That’s really what’s going to deliver autonomy. What this presentation showed me was that once upon a time, we could only sense not very good, you know, dot matrix printer.

Now we can sense pretty good. So the technology now, whether or not, you know, just because I can see it just because you me and [00:13:00] the dog can see a picture. Does that mean the computers are really able to make decisions that mean that autonomy can come? I don’t really know. And when people in the audience tried to ask questions about that, the blokes attitude was kind of like, you know, I’m just Designing the football boot.

And so, so you might remember in the presentation we had about hydrogen trucks and this presentation sort of sits or this pod sits with the hydrogen trucks one really as a sort of new technology kind of thing. I developed this rather silly metaphor about David Beckham’s football boot. I guess I should say Messi now, shouldn’t I?

Because I’m not, but, you know, it’s a silly metaphor because I don’t understand football properly. But the point is that to me, the skill is the player, Pelé, Messi, you know, bloody Matt Letizia, good lord, where did I pull that name from? But, you know, that is, it’s the player, not whether he’s wearing an adidas boot or a new boot or a, Oh, boo, or a green boo or one with a [00:14:00] stripe or whatever, all of those things, they make a difference, but that’s just the visual thing that you see.

And that’s just the part that connects with the ball before it sails in a beautiful curve into the, into the goal, the player, the leg. That’s the important bit, the foot inside, it’s the person that’s important. So this is the metaphor that I’m developing for saying that I feel like this LIDAR device was nothing but David Beckham’s football boot.

I feel like these hydrogen trucks, similarly, they’re the football boot. Even the hydrogen station is the football boot, because the real shtick is delivering the hydrogen cleanly to the station. So just as, as a historian, you always want to below the hood a little bit, look under the hood a little bit, because, you know, that’s our value add, isn’t it?

Because the scientists, they’re the ones that obsess with the details and Lord knows we need them to, if these technologies are going to work, but they struggle with, uh, you know, generally speaking, Pretty obsessive [00:15:00] about that branch, let alone the tree, let alone the rest of the forest. And they need us to see the forest.

So look, I’m full of silly metaphors today. Metaphors, John, come on, speak with a proper turn of phrase. Well, you’ve got the flat London, uh, London vowels. There was a slide show. Um, I might add some of them. There were sort of top Trump slides that, you know, showed whether or not the thing could, I guess, The old ones could only see 160 meters and these ones can see 200 meters usually and 300 meters most of the time or something like that.

I mean, all of it is, All of it’s a moot point, isn’t it? Right? The other thing that we spent a lot of time talking about was like the angle of, I don’t know, right? Some engineering term, but basically imagine there’s a tire lying on the road. Can the car see it? Obviously the old ones couldn’t. The new ones, they can like, you know, they could see a fucking ant crossing the road kind of thing.

That’s, that’s the sort of, uh, [00:16:00] no, nobody asks the thing. Everyone’s like, I’m like, yeah, 30 miles an hour. Yeah. It’s 70. Okay. But I I’m and you know, it’s the German makers. So, you know, they will have asked the question. We’ll carry to 150, which is obviously, you know, their, their design parameter, isn’t it? But we know that they cover the cost of 155, right?

So 150 would seem to be the measure. So, you know, Clearly, the technology, you know, what I’m saying is you’re not going to find that if you drive 120 miles an hour, you outrun the Lidar in the way that I outrun my, outran my lights in the Mustang in Death Valley and crashed off the road that time, which I mentioned in, uh, in another pod recently.

Yeah, no, not like that, right? This, the device is going to be properly developed. And, and, and that was that. Technology moving from early stage to being, well, at one point I wrote down ruggedized because that’s what, when I used to sell tech products, [00:17:00] that’s what we used to tell people who were doing construction, you’d put like the, the PC would be like covered in rubber.

So, you know, it wasn’t like, or, you know, so it could be dropped and so on. And, you know, like our phone cases are now, you know, it’s, uh, yeah, there’s a lot of NVH I wrote down. You heard me turning my page over there. Didn’t you? There’s a lot of. NBH and, and Rafael is the amusing way he framed it was he said that we have 15 years of experience building these things.

So we know many ways to break a leader. I think he was Italian was a very Italian way of, uh, of, of expression himself. So, so look for 15 years doing it, 700 patents, 60, 600 engineers working on it, 220, 000 leaders on the road at the moment. That’s some brawl. Valeo is unique in that they have a full stack proposition.

We, again, that wasn’t his phrase, but that was sort of what he was meaning. I think [00:18:00] what the impression I got was, was that he was saying, you know, the other guys, they might only do the burger or the buns. We do the burger and the buns as well. I, I got the impression there might need to be relish and catch up and, and, and things like that as well.

So what do I, you know, what do, what do I mean by that? I, I mean that there’s hardware, software, and integration. I mean that what Valio do is they have a technology, which means that where when you’re driving down the street, they not only recognize that an object. They not only, you know, have their many data points going out, but at a certain point they’re able to say, this is a cyclist.

This is a pickup truck, this is a cow, and therefore assign certain kinds of behavior to that kind of object. So that interpretation, [00:19:00] that is useful for some of their customers and not for others. So, and this is one of the things that came out that I thought was quite interesting is some OEMs have no talent in this area at all.

Other OEMs are like, sell me the sensor. All I want is the sensor. All of the system engineering, they’re building in house, other guys aren’t doing that. And I just thought that was interesting because I watched this video just recently that I’m going to link to. It’s a YouTube video. I don’t know how well researched it was.

It just was a interesting idea that I’d never encountered before. It was a company called Foxconn, um, who I’d never heard of before, but they make mobile phones. They’re contracted makers of smartphones. other devices. Your odds are, you know, you’re probably listening to this pod on a device that these dudes built.

Uh, the video, the, the YouTube that I, I watched about them made the point that they’re moving into the automotive space. And it makes sense, doesn’t it? Cause the car is becoming more like a smartphone when the [00:20:00] electric motor on it or some electric motors on it. And a battery, you know, much more like a smartphone than like a traditional car.

So, so the, you know, century of manufacturing experience that the major car make a century and a half approaching some of the bloody Mercedes Benz, uh, that counts for nothing right in, uh, in this world. And, and there were headwinds according to the video around Foxconn being able to, you know, achieve the kind of.

Dominance in the market that they have, but yeah, so I’m not really, I think I made my point there. Didn’t I? I’m not sure there’s nobody to bounce back and say, yes, John, you made your point really well. And then gimme a moment to think whilst I’m coming up with the next thing, isn’t it? But I suppose I could just edit properly.

Yeah. Okay. So the original technology was, was, uh, uh, by, I, it was an I-B-O-I-B-E-O product, which, um, they basically licensed the technology into Scalia into what became, so it [00:21:00] was the company’s value. The product name is Scarla Scar. Chief Justice, isn’t he? Scala is the name of the product. Um, the new one has nothing to do with the IBO, has no, none of the IBO.

international property. Um, anyway, the original one was always small. He always looked like a valentine one. This new one’s a bit bigger, actually. The original one really did look like a sort of valentine one, like smaller than an old VHS cassette.

Interesting. This came out of a question. This is why it’s so awesome to go to these events face to face, because some of the questions you’re like, wow, I know more than that, because I was reading in Wikipedia when I was having a beer before I came here, which you’re a bit like, wow. But then at the same time, [00:22:00] you’re like, oh, okay.

Even in this environment, Society of Automotive Engineers, yeah. In Stanford, 30 people, you know, boss man of the company in the country presenting to us, even in this environment, there’s still people who fundamentally don’t understand how lead our work. So that gives you, it gives me a feeling my. Thoughts here are likely to be, I don’t want to say, you know, cutting edge or no, but on the edge of the zeitgeist, right?

I would say perhaps just based upon the questions that other people ask, right? But some of the questions people ask leave you feeling like, wow, you obviously work in the industry and then it gives you insight into what the industry is like, you know, the fellow with the The talking about how the technology can pick up a single photon of light.

This is another one of those that made the question that, that, that led to me jotting down here. The, at the moment, remember I said that each [00:23:00] of the makers has their own, like little partner manufacturer, each of the car makers. Each of the German car makers has their own little partner maker making this, this LIDAR tag.

The data outputs are not standardized. That means you can’t take like the Valeo Scala sensor and make it talk to the BMW brain. It literally speaks a different language. The protocols are different. So, the question was about standardization, because when standardization had come around, um, some other, like, autonomous vehicle technology, that’s when leaps and bounds had happened.

Um, and, uh, you know, our man said the only thing a bloke whose job it is to sell the technology said, which was, you know, when standardization comes, that would be a cool thing. But, you know, for the time being, we’re living in this world where some of us are speaking French and some of us are speaking German and some of us are speaking Italian.[00:24:00]

And obviously there’s a bun fight going on, right? Obviously there’s, uh, there’s, uh, uh, a war. Anyway, right. They started developing in 2010. It came to market in 2017. Um, only they and Velodyne were in the market at that time. Velodyne has since been bought by somebody else. And I, I mean, whatever with the cute corporate thing.

I mean, who cares? Well, maybe you care. I don’t know if you’re some serious person. Probably if you were some serious person hoping to claim useful information from me, you’d have dropped out by now. You probably thought you came to the wrong place when you got stupid heavy metal. Anyway, the device lasts 8, 000 hours or, uh, 15 years.

That’s how long the device is made to last. So, um, he just told you the built in obsolescence of your new Audi, right there, 15 years, in line with the corporation’s requirements. The device is going to last 8, 000 hours and 15 years. And I’ll tell you why. If this bloke was engineering, you can bet this bloody thing is going to fail, you know, when it’s built.

[00:25:00] 15 and a half years old, I was impressed by him, um, as, uh, as an individual. So they had one slide that was a sort of like, what’s the box, what’s inside the box kind of thing. And then they even passed the bits round. So one of the features of these autonomous cars, they’re like Waymo taxis or cruise back when they were allowed in, in San Francisco is the spinning.

wheels. Well, that’s the LiDAR. And, and what it is, is, is LiDAR’s laser and the spinning mirror throws the laser all around to do the 360. So if it’s one on the roof, it’s a single LiDAR system. When you see the LiDAR, one LiDAR in every corner, it means the car might have five LiDAR systems just to perceive the area immediately around it.

The other thing is, is the way that he explained it and the way that I understood it from reading on Wikipedia is slightly different, but fundamentally, the mirror [00:26:00] fractions, the lead are up and the early ones only had four. Like laser beams, basically from the spin and then other ones at 16 and the current ones are 520 or something.

I’ll post in the link the photos that I took of the like the top Trump slides that they posted. If you’re that interested in in the speeds and feeds, one thing about those speeds and feeds is is that, of course. It’s all about what the manufacturer is ready to pay for, and that’s all about what’s affordable, and that’s all about what the economies of scales are.

So you feel like they could have developed a vastly superior technology if the market was there. A, you feel, you know, all of those top trumps all of the, all of the top Trump stats are variable, but you know, you can toggle ’em all based upon the amount of money that, that you, that, that you throw at the problem.[00:27:00]

Oh, this was interesting. He said, uh, on some cars, you might see two boxes, but don’t be fooled. It’s just like Audi’s fake exhaust, right? On some models, they put two boxes in to make the front of the car look symmetrical, but there’s one second box. One box is empty. One box is full, just like those big exhausts they put on the, um, nothing but, you know, plastic on the bumper.

I don’t like Audis for that, can I just say. That sort of fakey do ness. I mean, I don’t really like modern BMWs for that. I don’t know where modern BMWs have gone with the design style. I hate to be negative, but really, guys, you’ve lost your way. Like, anybody who’s a designer at BMW now, just, like, don’t. Go and get your hands on an E30 and just drive an E30 around the block and just [00:28:00] shut your eyes and think about what makes that car what it is.

You will be impressed by it, because nobody who drives E30s fails to be impressed by just how everything is just as it should be. And I follow on the school run one of these new electric cars. SUV, like X5 size SUVs. I mean, it’s a, it’s a piece of design, but in the same way that, you know, a cruise ship is a piece of design.

You’re just like, my God. Yeah. Completely, rarely has a company so Gone from being, I don’t know, people still buy the stuff, don’t they? I mean, what the hell, the prettlers and journalists and scribblers like me now, if it was up to people like me, we’d all be driving supercharged Lancia HP Volume Xs, wouldn’t we?

If, uh, if anybody can remember what they look like in there. Look, I’ve digressed completely and totally. Ponder had some work with traffic jam pilot with a [00:29:00] product called traffic jam pilot around about the time of the pandemic scarlet to, um, problem with scarlet. One was it’s like low down on the bumpers.

So that really hurt how much you could see what they wanted to have was a Perceptor is like a much higher up, just like on your PlayStation. The bumper cam’s hard to place the car. If you have that position where you’re sitting in the car, or if you’re up above the car, much better driving positions, you like hood cam.

So they wanted the hood cam. They were like, dude, we’re done with the bumper cam. We want the hood cam position. So they developed this flat one that looked a bit like a, you know, size of a. You know, traditional box of chocolates, basically. Um, and that was supposedly meant to go, uh, on, on the roof of, of the car.

I guess it was going to go above where the driving mirror would normally be or, or something like that. The output of, uh, yeah, this is, this is where it went from form. Layers of lasers to 16 and the range went from 150 to 180 meters. But I don’t know how they can [00:30:00] measure that because apparently one of the problems Lidar has is it gets really confused if there’s bad weather.

Like if you, like, if it rains, my word, it’s like California motorcyclists, it just cannot do it. I’m not joking, by the way, I don’t want to ride on California roads in the weather, those bloody potholes and with all the stuff that comes out, you know, I’m not, you know, I am that California rider now. I’m just saying that, you know.

It doesn’t like bad weather. It’s not like rugby, you know, the game doesn’t continue. Wisconsin football.

It could detect lanes. Scala 2 could detect lanes as well. So the things that he looks to toggle, this is these three levers that I was looking to toggle. Packaging, performance, and price. Interesting that packaging comes first, right? So that means not just the [00:31:00] form factor of the device, but the output. Of the device and that bolt on that they have where they don’t just send, they don’t just send the dots out the back.

They’re like, Oh, these bunch of dots. That’s probably a bike and those bunch of dots. That’s probably a tire. You know, it like it gives some. A, it gives the, it gives the brain some, you know, the other systems, some agent interpreting what it’s, uh, what it’s looking at, obviously, I was going to say that, like, you know, that, that, you know, relish and mayonnaise and ketchup on the burger there, that is clearly where you’re able to make a ton of money, right?

Because that’s all the consultancy and the setup. And clearly I feel like that. Kind of thing that’s going to be crudely. Let’s not beat around the bush. That’s going to be the kind of thing that Mercedes are going to spend money on. And, you know, Chrysler probably aren’t right. So there’s that. I [00:32:00] think if I was a German maker, I would be looking to achieve some kind of differentiation around that.

Beyond the fact that I’m just first in the space and, you know, you can bet Mercedes know exactly how good Audi’s is and Audi know exactly how good BMW’s is. It’s, it’s, uh, so that was quite interesting seeing into that little silo.

Valeo, their Scala 2 had a wash wipe setup that looked exactly like, you know, the wash wipe on Martin and Mark Gami’s Ford Sierra 2 litre. Gear, they looked exactly like they like squid water and did a white, but you know, that, as I said to you, the bad weather can really mess it up. And if there’s like, literally, if there’s a fly in front of it, that’s a huge blind spot, you know, that is, and, and if you [00:33:00] think about the, that fly cause the car to make.

A completely terrible decision. Yeah. So, you know, I don’t need to drill into into that. So when it’s icy, there’s a heater as well. The other thing that they developed was, uh, what I wrote down here was it’s too fucked for me to work kind of functionality, which is, in other words, when that bugs on there, if it does the wash, wipe and the bug still there.

Maybe it’s not a bug. Maybe it’s taken a stone. That’s why it can’t see because the lens has got a big bash in it. Now it’s now able to say, you know, hold up his hands and say, yeah, you know, my leg’s broken. I can’t work anymore. Previously. I don’t know what the old one used to do, but we all know how computers work.

So, you know, clearly they, for him to make, so, so that wraparound for customers that makes their product, [00:34:00] you know, they like to toggle packaging performance and price. Those were the three things he said. They like to, the manufacturers, the OEMs like to, to toggle around on. And what I jotted down here was, uh, of course, because of Valeo’s background.

You know, , I bet you the wash wipe on pers on the Pergo 6 0 4 of the 1980s was made by Val. You know, they’re a bit like AC Delco or Motorcraft, or, you know, Lucas, aren’t they? They’re, they’re, uh, they’re one of those players that have been, uh, been been around for, for, for ages. So anyway, um. So it’s way better in the inclement weather, and it’s just more of a bait technology, right?

That’s that Scalia 2. So, so that came along in 2022 for Mercedes and for Kia, um, Scala 3. This is the new one with the 2. 6 billion. This is the one that is now no longer in any way related to the [00:35:00] IBO technology, which they have been using, you know, so not even their technology, right? In other words, when Valeo came to go into the space, they were like, we don’t want to build this from scratch.

Whose intellectual property should we, who’s kind of been doing something like this before will buy their intellectual property? The This is now. So, so this is the, like the, this is, you know, this is like Kia no longer building knockoff Mitsubishi. This is them building their own car. This is their own, um, intellectual property.

This, this scar, uh, three from 16 layers of laser to 520 layers. This spa. Technology, the P of the SPAD is this photon pickup. I, I missed exactly what the engineer was saying, but believe me, that was a rabbit hole that was just completely, you know, beyond, beyond my, beyond my scope. Cause what you’re talking about is fractions of lasers [00:36:00] being able to pick up, uh, uh, bounce back and pick up data points is really, uh, yeah.

So as a scholar, two could do lanes, scholar three, you can see potholes. Yeah, in terms of a practical application, you know, the question hit there is a question. This, this illustrates where the debate is at the moment. You might be listening to this like 25 years in the future when the technology works really well.

This illustrates even at Stanford, even in the Society of automotive engineers, somebody asked whether or not. It had the, if it could pick up a tire lying in the road, could it pick up a lane marking? And the guy went, well, maybe it could, maybe it couldn’t, but it would pick up the lane marking based upon its reflectiveness by using one of each other’s systems.

And my first thought was, well, that’s bloody obvious, what a stupid question. And then I thought, Actually, no, unless you thinking about unless you’re in the world of thinking about how autonomous cars are perceiving the world, and you’re aware that they have [00:37:00] multiple sources, which maybe most people aren’t.

Maybe that wasn’t such a silly question after all. But, you know, it does. It just illustrates the gap in terms of perception of where the technology Is and, and, and what it can do and, and how it works. So Stellantis and quote, a leading robo taxi company are going to be introducing it in Q2 of 2025 and an Asian maker in Q4 of 2025.

Who could the leading robo taxi company be? If not Waymo, I just want to say.

So there you have it, the evolution of Lidar technology. Having just talked through that, what further insights do I have that, look, we, we’ve moved from it being a non functional technology to it being a functional technology since 2017, [00:38:00] haven’t we? There are hundreds of thousands of these things, LiDAR systems, out on the road at the moment.

The LiDAR system itself, the value of the LiDAR system, lies, yes, in the LiDAR device itself being able to tell the brain what it’s seeing, but equally in the Lidar system being functional as part of this complete suite, which means the vehicle can work. So in, in other words, you know, autonomy is a cake and it needs the flour of LIDAR amongst the eggs and all of the, well, am I with the food metaphors here?

But you understand what I mean that the LIDAR, the value of it is not just as an individual thing. Like it’s not like an individual system. It’s, it’s, it’s [00:39:00] value as part of the system holistically and the system needs to work in a holistic way for any of it to have any value. So you can’t look at it and be like, well, this sense is worth 500 or 5, 000 or 50, 000.

If the Audi is worth 150, 000, it can’t drive without it. You know what I mean? It’s a, that’s what we’re, what, what we’re talking about. about with it. I, uh, had my glimpse into the future and, uh, uh, went home and made arrangements to buy a 1986 Suzuki GSX R 750, a bike which when I then Subsequently went to pick it up, not only terrified me, but proved so reluctant to go into gear that it took me 10 or 15 minutes fiddling around in the garage here to be confident [00:40:00] that I could actually be able to even faintly operate the machine, let alone ride it to anywhere near its potential.

So, There, I just did this pivot from the Sublime to the Ridiculous, or maybe from the Ridiculous to the Sublime, I’m not quite sure which. That Suzuki’s a 1986, it’s hard to believe that it’s that recent. It’s so primitive and visceral and just such a, just such a Bucket of cold water in the face of a motoring experience is just incredible.

This autonomous world we’re shifting into, that was 1985. This is, give or given, give or take 2025. What, 60 years difference, so that would take us to 2085. I think we can see by 2085. We can say that these systems, by that point, by the middle of the century, these systems are going to be nailed [00:41:00] down, aren’t they?

And if, if the systems are nailed down for, for ground transportation, and if we’re able to utilize things like AI, to move us properly. I think those visions of flying cars moving us around, I think those are something which, uh, will come certainly before the turn of the next century. So look, with that prophecy that I wasn’t, um, intending to make at all, I’m gonna end it.

Thanks for your time,

brother.[00:42:00] [00:43:00]

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