Hyundai Mobis invests $50m in Velodyne for lidar development

Hyundai Mobis, a top-tier auto parts maker in South Korea, will invest $50 million in Velodyne, a leading lidar company based in California, to achieve its aim of mass producing level 3 autonomous driving lidar system in two years, the company said Wednesday.

By forging the partnership, the two will collaborate on new lidar system supply by integrating Velodyne’s latest lidar sensors with Hyundai Mobis’ cognitive software, it said in a statement.

Velodyne, founded by a US inventor David Hall, is a Silicon Valley-based lidar technology company that holds the largest share of the global lidar market. By using Velodyne’s lidar with high specification, Hyundai Mobis will develop and integrate its own cognitive software to be designed to process the outside vehicle environment data gather by lidar sensors.

The goal of the partnership is to commercialize a lidar system for level 3 autonomous driving in 2021. Starting from the Asian market, the two plan to supply the system to carmakers in North America and Europe, it added.

The lidar system, to be developed in partnership with Velodyne, completes its sensor technology line up for autonomous driving of level 3 and above, which shifts human control to an independent car system. As in in-house project, Hyundai development a short-range radar last year. It also plans to secure deep learning-based camera and high-performance radar technology by next year.

“Hyundai Mobis is delighted to cooperate with Velodyne Lidar, one of the industry’s most reliable and mass-production-ready Lidar sensor providers to finalize a lidar system which is essential in high-level autonomous driving,” said Ko Young-suk, head of strategic planning at Hyundai Mobis. “Hyundai Mobis will continue to expand strategic collaboration with various innovators to accelerate open innovation for key technologies.”

By Cho Chung-un (christory@heraldcorp.com)