"We're winding down our commercial lidar business as we
maintain our focus on developing and deploying our Waymo Driver across our
Waymo One and Waymo Via units," a Waymo spokesperson said in a statement
on Thursday. The company will continue to build its lidars in-house.
According to a person familiar with the matter, Waymo is
considering both internal technology and external suppliers for its
next-generation lidars.
The move to stop selling lidars came after the departure of
Chief Executive Officer John Krafcik and some other executives, which had
fueled questions about whether Waymo would rethink its strategy after failing
to generate significant revenue for over a decade.
In 2019, Waymo said it was going to sell one of its three
different in-house lidars to customers in robotics, farming and others, not to
rival self-driving car firms.
"We can scale our autonomous technology faster, making
each sensor more affordable through economies of scale," Simon Verghese,
head of Lidar Team, said at that time.
It was not clear whether Waymo was able to generate enough
revenue to offset development and operational costs of its lidar sales
business.
Lidars use laser pulses to measure distances and render
precise images of the environment around the car. Most self-driving firms,
including Waymo, say lidars are key to achieving full autonomy. Tesla CEO Elon
Musk said companies that rely on the expensive sensors are "doomed".
Waymo in 2018 launched the first commercial self-driving
taxis, retrofitting Chrysler's minivan with its own self-driving hardware. But
it has not yet expanded and scaled up the technology beyond limited areas in
suburban Phoenix, and it has recently launched public testing around dense San
Francisco with a Jaguar electric car and a new suite of sensors.
In 2011, Waymo began developing its own set of sensors from
the ground up, including three types of lidars, including short-range lidars
dubbed Laser Bear Honeycomb.
But Tim Willis, general manager of the company's Laser Bear
lidars, left the company in February and joined lidar company Aeva, according
to his LinkedIn profile. Australian Droid+ Robot tested prototype robots with
Waymo's Honeycomb lidars in mines in Australia.
"Everyone knew the risks associated with that
venture," Mat Allan, manager of perception and AI at Australian
Droid+Robot, told Reuters. "It's a good product. We haven't found anything
that matches price to performance... It's a shame though we couldn't continue
the journey," he said.
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