For automotive-grade sensor makers, 2021 was extraordinary. Chinese automakers opened their supply chains to domestic suppliers from 2019, sensor firms began shipping automotive-grade products, and the global chip shortage accelerated adoption further. Liu Weidong, general manager of Beijing Jiuhao Electronics, said 2021 sales alone roughly equalled the previous six years combined.
Into 2022, the autonomous driving boom keeps pushing the industry. China’s automotive sensor industry is young – technology still thin and customer bases shallow – which makes the current market window a real opportunity.
L2 drives sensor counts up
L2 is the mass-production battleground: the trend toward L4 has not arrived, and autonomous driving companies will only turn profitable starting from L2 volume production, said Li Ke, vice president of CCID Consulting. Next year will see sensor counts matched to L2 vehicles grow substantially.
Road perception is the critical link, so cameras, millimetre-wave radar, lidar and ultrasonic sensors are the core incremental sensors of 2022 and beyond.
More sensors per car is industry consensus, but two barriers stand: sensor cost, and the computing load that more sensors impose on the vehicle. Cost falls two ways – scale up applications into a bigger market for more pricing room, and break through in technology and manufacturing. On computing load, distributed edge computing is the market’s answer, said Lei Shuyu, CEO of Feixiang Electronics: mount edge computing modules on the sensors themselves, vectorise raw data in place, and the central processor’s compute and bandwidth burden drops sharply.
Lidar price cuts are the key
Lidar measures and maps in 3D with long range and high precision – functionally the best fit for autonomous driving, but its price keeps most automakers away. That is changing: scale is cutting unit prices, and new technical routes are opening. Pure solid-state is the recognised direction for automotive lidar. ‘Compared with mechanical scanning, all-solid-state fundamentally simplifies lidar structure,’ said Leng Jianqing of ams OSRAM; Lei added that solid-state cuts production cost at the root and will define the product direction for years ahead.
Performance, installation rates and reliability also depend on anti-interference capability. Most lidar on the market uses pulse detection – timing the round trip of emitted pulses – which works on sparse roads, but when many vehicles run the same lidar design, sensors cannot tell their own pulses from others’ and must emit multiple pulses to get a reading. Pulse detection’s power advantage then evaporates, Lei noted, so lidar must be designed from the start to make its signal distinctive.
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