![]() He insists lidar is the marquee sensor, the way to give the car’s software the quality data it needs to make driving decisions in any situation. “Sure, maybe 100 years from now,” Russell retorts. ![]() It’s the official tool for testing lidar sensors, the radar-like devices that build an image of the world by firing lasers beams and measuring how long each takes to bounce back after hitting an object. This material, called Permaflect, is specially certified for “uniform spectral response,” to reflect just 10 percent of light that it hits (and it costs between $10,000 and $20,000). Standing at one end of the empty building, Russell hands me a pair of binoculars and points my gaze to a 30-by-30-ish square of black posterboard, resting on an easel 200 meters away. A system that Toyota, a major carmaker with rapidly expanding self-driving car ambitions, says it plans to adopt for use in its vehicles. Not for a fun or lavish celebration-in fact, there are only about six of us gathered in the cavernous building-but because it’s one of the few places in the city big enough to demonstrate the power of the lidar system Russell has spent the last five years creating. ![]() ![]() But Luminar, a small company dedicated to a far corner of the nascent autonomous vehicle industry, and its 22-year-old founder, Austin Russell, happily shelled out thousands of dollars to rent Pier 35. Renting out a 100,000-square-foot San Francisco cruise ship terminal feels ostentatious, even for a Silicon Valley coming out party. ![]()
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