Tesla crash opens doors for advanced innovations in driver-less tech

The fatal crash of a Tesla self-driving car that left one dead has proven to be a trigger for the development of advanced and sensitive systems to help vehicles see and drive themselves safely, investors and analysts said.

Goldman Sachs has forecasted that the market for advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous vehicles will grow from about $3 billion last year to $96 billion in 2025 and $290 billion in 2035. More than half of that revenue in 20 years will come from radar, cameras, and lidar (a sensor that uses the laser).

Tesla’s Autopilot system uses cameras and radar, but not lidar. The company said that the system was had difficulty distinguishing a white semi-trailer positioned across a road against a bright sky, which led to the crash. This incident highlighted the limitations of current automated driving systems.

“As we move to a higher level of autonomy in vehicles, you’re going to want to have more redundancy, which radar and lidar can provide,” Dan Galves, senior vice president at vision safety system maker Mobileye NV said.

Although carmakers have already started using multiple sensor technologies to develop driver-less cars, those are in testing. Semi-automated systems such as General Motor Co’s M SuperCruise and Traffic Jam Pilot from Audi are due on the market in 2017-2018. Ford Motor Co expects to deploy a semi-automated system, using Velodyne lidar, in 2018. Toyota Motor Corp, which is investing more than $1 billion in such self-driving technologies as robotics and artificial intelligence, said it aims to put fully driverless cars on the road in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

The technology to back it up is also making huge strides. Mobileye, an Israeli supplier of vision-based safety systems to 25 global automakers, including Tesla, today is valued at nearly $10 billion. The company, which went public in 2014, plans to offer a hardware/software system by 2020 that can gather, fuse and analyze data from 20 different sensors, including cameras, lidar, and radar. The company’s new EyeQ5 “system on chip” will be a key component in a fully autonomous driving system that is being jointly developed by BMW AG and Intel Corp, and is expected to go into production in 2021.

Like Mobileye, Velodyne, a leading supplier of laser-based lidar systems, works with many of the world’s top automakers, including Ford, GM, BMW, Toyota Honda Motor Co and Daimler AG Mercedes-Benz.