At that speed, Russell says, his company’s lidar can give about 14 seconds’ warning. The Uber taxi that killed a pedestrian last month was apparently doing 60 kilometers per hour (38 mph). That would provide plenty of time for a self-driving car to react to events, even at highway speeds. Luminar’s set can see 250 meters down the road, 50 m more than the prototype could manage a year ago. "These fleets will ultimately evolve into serial production models for the market." "Three other major auto makers have committed to using our platform for all their development," Russell says. Six months ago Toyota announced that its experimental self-driving car was using Luminar's lidar. The Las Vegas Strip, as seen by Luminar's lidar Video: Luminar Many of those startups haven’t even got a working prototype to show off. Lidar startups have come up like mushrooms-Russell says he’s tracking about 60 of them-but up to now none of them could match production numbers with the industry’s pioneer, Velodyne, whose roof-mounted rotating beacon has become the identifying mark of the self-driving car. And, at 6 feet, 4 inches, Russell has to work at being inconspicuous. After all, we’re 12 days into the second quarter. Russell is good at staying under the radar, having kept Luminar in stealth mode for its first five years. That’s an achievement, and Russell has evidently kept the production milestone under his hat for a while. “We had been using optics PhDs to hand-assemble them by year’s end one’ll be coming off the line every 8 minutes.” “This year we will produce 5000 units per quarter, enough to equip every autonomous car unit on the road,” he said, during a visit to our offices in Manhattan on Monday. Founder Austin Russell is now 23, and he tells IEEE Spectrum that his company has started mass production. Luminar, a lidar startup founded by a 16-year-old, has come of age.
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