Luminar Day: A New Era
[Music] well welcome everybody Welcome to our second annual Luminar day woohoo Yes. My name is Emily Shanklin I head up marketing here at Luminar we are broadcasting live from our new Silicon Valley headquarters here in Sunnyvale California fun fact this facility used to be the offices of our friends over at Volvo so it's particularly appropriate that we are having our first West Coast Installation of Luminar day here in this facility we've got a great morning planned with lots of updates across the business so without further ado let's jump right into it with our Founder and CEO Austin Russell Alright thank you Emily. Amazing all right welcome everyone so great to see some familiar faces new faces all the above and a warm welcome to everyone on the on the live stream here so be great to get this all kicked off moving full speed ahead so first want to be able to just set the stage again just a reminder of the problem that we're solving and the impact that we can have so on average American drivers spend on the order of 93 billion hours and 3 trillion miles driving every year and at a global scale that ultimately leads to around 1.2 million annual fatalities from vehicle collisions very very serious problem that has to be addressed and one of the leading causes of death and fatalities among particularly below ages 44 it's indiscriminate of age altogether and this is something that affects everyone loved ones those and beyond and not to get too morbid but I've said this before statistically on average you know on the order of one in a 100 of us will tragically lose our life in a vehicle accident and that means that statistically at least what between here and live stream you know five people are more likely than not to tragically lose their lives at some point because of this fundamental problem with the automotive industry and with vehicle accident and we know this is a problem it's the thing is is that even with the most advanced technologies out on the road today with cameras and radar systems even for some of the most basic kinds of scenarios that we're talking about for assisted driving capabilities they they can fail in 70% of you know for even just something as simple as stopping for a pedestrian in automatic emergency breaking type functionality and that's just one of many examples of the kinds of things that are important and we're going to get into a little bit more around the statistics as well as a breakthrough new safety research from Swiss Re that is able to help prove some of this point and show the benefit of what we can do that ultimately amounts to for example in just the us alone an estimated $1.4 trillion of annual economic societal harm from motor vehicle crashes and you know I mean we're seriously we're talking like a material percentage of the you know US GDP at this stage I mean this is a it's a very very real problem that has to be addressed so one interesting comparison i'd like to draw that's like a relatively recent example is how safety is handled in other kinds aspects of the transportation industry and other kinds of forms of transportation there's a very recent example in the aviation industry where you know what late last year early this year there was kind of a shocking incident of a door plug blowout on a 737 Max they got everyone into a frenzy public outrage you know we all saw the headlines around this and ultimately LED to the ouster of the CEO of Boeing in the wake of ongoing safety concerns for a non-fatal incident and I think it just goes to show of the kind of standards that can be set in certain transportation industries about how seriously safety is taken so you take a look at this compared to the automotive industry if you take a look we talked about global automotive fatalities on the order of 1.2 million per year take a look at that equivalent number for the commercial aviation industry take a guess what do you think you know million? half a million? thousand? 72 that was that was it last year this is the kind of standard that automotive should be moving towards and just to take a little bit of an example as a reference given just how how much focus there was on that kind of incident if you were to take the same statistics for automotive and apply it into aviation it would be the equivalent of a 737 entirely full of people people falling out of the sky every hour of every day of the year consecutively with no survivors every single time put that into perspective I don't think any of us would be getting on a plane if that were happening yet at the same time we blissfully continue on our daily commutes in our cars every day without a worry in the world this is the fundamental problem now that said there was a proposed panacea of a solution a 'Driverless Utopia' so to say because the identified problem was always focused around humans and the question is how to replace humans altogether this is what was posed by you know some of the largest companies that for centered around robotaxi development throughout the 2010s and even going into the 2020s this was you know and and was billed as basically the way to be able to dramatically improve vehicle safety and prevent accidents out on the road, but here's the thing is that there's more than one ways to be able to accomplish that you don't actually need to be able to replace the driver altogether to be able to start making an impact, but nevertheless this was this was supposed to be the way it is and I've been vocal what since probably 2017 about how this is going to be well I believe a great solution over the long term not one in the near term that you can that you can handle and this was the promise this is the reality so you know you take a look at these kinds of you know Robo taxi efforts and whatnot and it is an incredibly challenging problem this is where there's really no room for error when you have to have you know 10 nines worth of reliability and safety to handle every possible Edge case when you remove the driver and again this is where the vast majority of the industry has largely been focused and even today still companies on the order are deploying on the order of what 10 billion dollar a year you to be able to try and develop these kinds of robotaxi approaches it's easy to get confused you know in these kinds of you know scenarios you have the construction scenario you have vehicles wandering into places they probably shouldn't be at times they shouldn't be get set on fire crazy stuff like that happens and this whole perception issue around autonomy has really lead if you take a look at the Gartner cycle for autonomous vehicles a little bit of a business case study you know you have technology trigger event that sort of happened back in call it 2012 you have the Whos of this world that are really starting to ramp up Luminar was founded other kinds of things there you know a lot of different you know billion dollar deals or whatnot for over the 2010s for these kinds of robot taxi companies as well the peak of inflated expectations probably around 2019 2020 I think and Gartner agrees with us if we take a look at the star of where where we are today firmly at the bottom of the trough of disillusionment at the start of 2024 and the question is is that how and what will lift it out of that trough of disillusionment into that slope of Enlightenment to be able to actually realize this technology into commercial production into the hands of consumers and for people to realize the safety benefits of what these kinds of autonomous capabilities can ultimately deliver so this is where Luminar comes into play Luminar is all about enhancing the driver as opposed to replacing the driver this was our big bet and this big bet is now starting to be able to pay off instead of you know huge roof racks full of sensing systems and a supercomputer in the trunk and other things required to run something that's not industrialized our focus was always around in particular consumer production vehicles and being able to scale you know you know in high volume by working with you know traditional automakers as opposed to trying to build a new vehicle to service the broader world so this is a visual of what the next generation of safety and autonomy looks like and we'll have more to talk about today on a key the key Catalyst to help enable this future what we're accomplishing by with enhancing the driver is twofold one is significantly enhancing the safety of vehicles you know and both for the people in the vehicle and well people around the vehicle Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs) second is enabling autonomy and particularly with the focus on highways this can ultimately enable significant amount of time saved considering you know when we're talking about those many many billions of hours a huge portion of that you know maybe even on the order of half is spent on highways here's the thing we call this Luminar Day a new era and this new era begins with Volvo and with that we'll welcome Alwin who leads software at Volvo hello everyone I'm Alwin Bakkenes Head of Software Engineering at Volvo Cars I'm sorry I could not be there with you in person today the EX90 is designed to be the safest Volvo car ever powered by safe space technology and it is the start of a new era for our company a new era for safety sustainability and human centric technologies the EX90 is smart connected and electric and it's designed to improve over time through software updates for the first time we're integrating a long range automotive grade LiDAR into one of our cars and we do it for two purposes to improve convenience through more advanced assistance systems and of course always most important to Volver cars to help improve safety now safety is as you know core to who we are as a company we always strive to keep people safe and our choice to integrate LiDAR technology in the EX90 and working with Luminar is part of this we see that LiDAR technology holds a lot of promise to further reduce accidents and to help keep people safe the EX90 LiDAR delivered by Luminar can sense the road in front and is designed to be able to see small objects approximately two football fields ahead both in daylight and darkness at highway speeds giving us more time to act and avoid potentially dangerous driving situations by coupling our wider state-of-the-art censor set with in-house developed software running on the car's core system we aim to have the best understanding of the environment outside the car that we've had to date and this will help us enable the car to not only have the opportunity to become safer with time but also improve the functionality of highly appreciated features and functions such as Pilot Assist the EX90 was very positively received when it was first revealed a while back and people couldn't wait to place an order we're starting production of the EX90 in the first half of this year and we cannot wait to see them on the road with customers so to the entire team at Luminar thank you so very much for the collaboration thank you amazing so as Alwin was mentioning Volvo is no stranger to safety innovations and you know it's largely credited with developing a lot of the different kinds of of modern safety technologies that ultimately became standardized throughout the broader industry so you know everything from the original you know three-point seat belt that was introduced back in 1959 all the way to you know other kinds of modern airbag technologies even the introduction of systems like Mobileye and you know that's been core of the brand ever since the beginning so if you take a look at you know some of the kinds of innovations that they've had over the years you know we're very proud to now be added to that roster of historic safety Milestones throughout the broader automotive industry that Volvo has been able to help introduce just as they have for other kinds of previous you know technologies to substantially improve safety capabilities as well as ultimately enable next generation ADAS and autonomous capabilities so this is a lot in the making and not an overnight success you know we began working with you know Volvo what back in in 2017 back in the day and this they were one of the first to be able to really identify you know the significance of what LiDAR could have not just for you know Robo taxis or you know fully autonomous vehicles to replace drivers but actually to be able to enhance drivers and this was you know hugely significant in some groundbreaking research they were doing at the time with us in 2020 Volvo officially decided to be able to put you know our technology onto production cars starting off in low volume this is a huge milestone for the overall industry and really an industry first altogether for this kind of global production vehicle thing is things continue to accelerate by 2021 you know Volvo Cars had selected Luminar as a standard equipment for the EX90 seeing you know safety as something more of a fundamental right than something that should just be an option and you know Luminar is the first and only LiDAR technology to be launched on a global production vehicle and introduce a standard equipment and we're proud to say that you know ever since you know they first decided to put us on a vehicle in 2020 you know we've expanded the relationship and volumes with Volvo to date to what over an order magnitude more than 10x so we're very excited to be able to continue this relationship and continue scaling and goes to show how much opportunity there is with the automakers even that you're currently working with that's where you unlock so much value so we're not the only kind of new technology that Volvo is introducing there's other kinds of key partners that it takes to be able to make this successful and that's where you see other other companies like in this case NVIDIA which for the first time will be launched you know with with Luminar on the EX90 very excited to do this and this will be the first time that you see you know accelerated computing with GPUs along with you know high performance LiDAR and you know AI systems that can be launched on a on a global production vehicle in volume so you know very exciting opportunity but with that want to give a little bit of some history to the relationship here you know again going all the way back to to 2017 and you know some of the kinds of steps of what took to be able to ultimately not just develop the technology but also successfully industrialize leading up to this very special moment the technology advancement that's occurred to build one of these and then to be able to do so repeatedly and then get the performance in any being vehicle agnostic I mean it's an incredible feat as we achieve success in scaling our manufacturing in Mexico this gives us the volume and the capability to start supplying to a much larger part of the global automotive industry Volvo and Luminar are pioneer nearing new areas of safety where we will allow the car to take a bigger responsibility and make a better and more safe journey for the car user Iris our sensing system will be integrated into the roof line of the vehicles seamlessly a first for the industry the LiDAR provides a 3D map of the current environment up to 250 m in advance continuously as you drive this combination of Technology ensures that the EX90 is quite simply the safest car that Volvo has ever produced we have a new Luminar LiDAR system fitted directly to the roof line for maximum visibility and maximum protection our unique LiDAR system incorporates leading edge technology from Luminar that allows us to see 250 meters in complete darkness this combination of technology will help avoid tragic accidents by up to 20% every EX90 will be born with Luminar LiDAR not just as an option or upgrade but as standard equipment on each new vehicle produced the Luminar Iris sensor helps create what Volvo calls An Invisible Shield of Safety that allows the EX90 to see beyond human range in darkness at long distances with extreme precision down to a centimeter and at highway speed for their technical team to understand the importance of having LiDAR at the roof line so they can see the entire scene provide context to the function group and to the algorithm team so that they can really deliver the safety and deliver the autonomy necessary and to package it in such a way that it is a beautiful piece but also that safety jewel at the top is is really a signifier for the for the whole industry and we're not going to stop until our technology is on every vehicle out on the road and the key next big milestone is all about the Volvo launch with the EX90 so this the first truly global production vehicle launch with these kinds of capabilities and it'll be a game changer for the world [Applause] Alright thank you everyone incredible history there with with Volvo and thank you for the Volvo guys on here for the incredible partnership over the years come a very very long way and you know it almost say that with this the past 10 years of Luminar and well arguably a lot of the broader industry for this kind of system and technology in terms of its introduction has been leading up to this very very special moment and I'm proud to announce that Luminar has officially kicked off our Start of Production for Volvo Cars now this is a like quite a ways in the making for quite a time and and a key industry level milestone like said so so proud and a huge thank you to the team a huge thank you to our partners a huge thank you to you know everyone from our customers all the way through the supply chain that has worked through this to be able to make this all possible and and a fantastic outcome so you know would would say this is that this is something that you know what back in the day I think it was almost unheard of to be able to try and build a technology build a product industrialize this and get to a stage of where we can deliver directly to automakers and do so at global OEM production standards and do so in volume we were able to achieve that despite the odds despite the naysayers despite everything along the way this is an absolutely fundamental transformative moment for our company and kicks off the new era there's a lot of different implications for this for our business the obvious of which is finally getting into the hands of consumers for the first time you can have this kind of capability of technology that the industry has seen economically this is the first time our nearly $4 billion order book will also begin to materially convert into revenue so this is where it goes from theoretical yeah cool maybe this is stuff will happen maybe not probably not to hey this is actually happening now and it's easy to forgive also some of the skepticism given that you know the vast majority of you know programs throughout the broader industry haven't successfully materialized to be able to launch but that's where Luminar is changing that narrative show how our bet on enhancing the driver is paying off and to be able to successfully deliver to scale and to be able to get this product out on roads and it's not just in any single geographic region Luminar is going global this is where we are deploying our technology across North you know what many many countries in North America Europe Asia All Around the World in key markets and this is where you'll start to see by the end of next year approaching you know six figures of you know Luminar equipped cars driving around collecting data being able to actually start enhancing the safety and assisted and ultimately autonomous capabilities on vehicles so we're very very proud to be able to have this deployed out on roads over the course of of this time frame and it all kicks off starting with this with this start of production and of course Volvo will have more to say in terms of the specifics of their of their vehicle roll out and other details there that's their place to talk about so but the question is what does that mean for Luminar not just in the long term but also in the near- term what this means is that Luminar you know is expecting to ship more than five times more product in the second half of this year than in the rest of our 12 year history combined something that we should all be very proud of and something that truly kicks off our exponential growth into the future now what this also does and one very important measure of this is that it also helps drastically enable our economies of scale that we've talked about for quite some time in terms of scaling that up while also at the same time helping drive our costs significantly down and that's really where the scale is needed to be able to make that happen there's a huge difference between a factory that you're able to have at capacity versus a factory that's at a small fraction of capacity and the key thing is is that we've made the big investments to be able to deliver the capacity that's needed to successfully scale into you know six figure and subsequently ultimately seven figure and into the future eight figure volumes so when you take a look at LiDAR specifically which is one part of our overall story is that it's very easy to forget about just how crowded this kind of landscape was and how challenging this problem really is you know if you take a look back what 2018 2019 2020 there were over 100 maybe even as many as 200 you know types of companies or efforts I should say more generally around LiDAR development the thing is is it turns out building technology that works is really freaking hard so you know to put it in scientifically that it's not just that though you also have to successfully industrialize the technology and be able to deliver to the kinds of Automotive specifications that are needed and also the ones to deliver the performance and safety to be able to operate the vehicle at speed and to be able to do so while significantly improving the safety capabilities and this is where you're talking about less than 10 companies that are ultimately able to sort of get their technology working be able to develop or deliver something the key thing is now Luminar is standalone in the sense that we've successfully built to the fundamental required specifications uniquely by innovating from the chip level up we've industrialized the technology to be able to successfully scale with the successful launch of our new factory in Mexico we've been able to work with the leading companies to introduce new kinds of safety technologies and at the same time even on the first vehicle launch be standardized for global production and in all those ways Luminar is number 1 So it takes a lot of work to be able to establish that global supply chain and you know that's where we don't do all of this ourselves of course we work hand in hand with our partners but it's important to have the right ecosystem partners from a supply chain perspective around the world to be able to create a diversified global footprint and this is where we successfully launched our factory in Mexico and start a production in collaboration with Celestica to be able to do final assembly for the LiDAR systems and testing Fabrinet we're we've been collaborating with with a facility in Thailand that they've had for Luminar which assembles the core optical components and transceiver components you know from the design and innovations that we have at Luminar and Fabrinet will either ship it to Mexico or respectively to China with in partnership with TPK which you know we announced a partnership with last year that they are successfully working with us to be able to launch and scale with subsequent product generations beyond Iris so we have some fantastic news and updates with regards to TPK that we're going to also give later today in the presentation so again Luminar is unique in being able to have the footprint that can successfully scale across the globe I'll also mention that it's unique in the sense that it's tariff optimized as well you know we're working with very strategic regions for example with Mexico with which has very favorable trade agreements with the US and other kinds of geographic regions Thailand same and you know China having local production is particularly very important for that Geographic Market in order to be able to successfully win business there so where where do all the sensors go Luminar is now awarded over 25 commercial programs so huge feet and milstone and continuing to accelerate and the key thing is in this industry is that the first 10 years of everything that we've done has all led up to this launch with Volvo that's the thing that's the catalyst because all eyes in the industry have been waiting to be able to see can this happen can Luminar successfully do this can they buck the trend can they help transform the global landscape and today we have our answer what does that do sort of with a a cheesy graphic you know kicks off a domino effect for all of these subsequent vehicle launches we're talking about a flurry of additional vehicle launches happening in just the next 36 months that are ultimately enabled by this EX90 launch and that's where it's all exponential scale from here it's a very like I said incredible journey to get to the first one but now we hit a strike whoa [Applause] there we go one other really important point power trains so there's three different major categories of vehicle power trains there's you know internal combustion engine battery electric vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles and even some subcategories then it like you know plugin hybrids and other kinds of things there historically what I've really seen a lot of is that Luminar are being particularly conflated specifically with just EVs and EV companies and EV startups and all of the above and this is an incredibly there's an incredibly important distinction here that Luminar is not an EV company in fact while there is a correlation of new platform development cycles with an increasing percentage of overall EVS Luminar is completely powertrain agnostic whether your car runs on dinosaur juice you know or whether it runs on lithium ion whether it runs on you know hydrogen whatever it may be it's independent the important part here is that Luminar unique Luminar is unique in the sense that it's planned into programs across all major power trains and in fact the majority of the vehicle platforms that Luminar is planned into actually have vehicle models with internal combustion engines why is this important well we all know a lot of the trends that have happened in the EV industry lately over the course of the past year there's been a large you know there's been a you know significant slowdown of sales particularly when it comes to like some of the newer startups and newer types of companies in this space and while you know that that is certainly kind of a factor in terms of like macroeconomic types of conditions this is not something that over the longer course of time you know Luminar being power powert train agnostic ultimately materially affects their business or the value of our business so this is where we're excited to be able to deliver across the industry for all different kinds of vehicles one last thing that I'd like to point out is around automotive adoption cycles and I think this is a really really important one when you take a step back because the thing is is that even for what we're talking about now in expanding with our our automakers today and we're we're capturing while we're capturing more value more vehicles than what all the autonomous test Robo taxi vehicles on the road times 100 you know probably for what we're launching with Volvo and beyond the thing is is that when it comes to automotive adoption cycles for broader standardization across the board these things are very long lead cycles automotive industry is a very high barrier to entry industry and also very high barrier to exit so when you take a look at other kinds of safety fundamental innovations and technologies that have been introduced over the years largely by specifically companies like Volvo and Mercedes both you know Landmark Luminar Partners it's generally around a 10 to 20 year adoption cycle from when the technology was first introduced to by the time it starts to become standardized on vehicles and ultimately mandated as standardized on vehicles what we're seeing on this is in a very important trend of where actually you know there is you know a an incredibly an incredible and accelerating rate of adoption that not only follows the trend of some of these curves but actually is even ahead of it why because the significance of what we can have you know with the LiDAR and with these adoption curves is so meaningful in terms of the impact which we'll get to talk about in a second validated by Swiss Re as leading a new safety study for Luminar so point is is that there's obviously some level of patience required but when you're able to standardize when you're able to get even a tiny fraction of the industry say for example you know we we've said before that just you know three or 4% market penetration that could be you know 5 billion revenue exponentially accelerating 60 billion forward looking order book just a tiny tiny slice so it's very easy to build a massively valuable company that's why you see even examples like the Teslas of this world that even only have a what a single digit percentage market penetration yet worth more than a lot of the other auto companies combined so as we pivot to a related topic around safety and insurance wanted to be able to give a quick nice clip from our our friend Warren Buffett here autonomous vehicles widespread would hurt us if they want to if if they spread the trucks and they would they would hurt our auto insurance business I think my personal view is that they will they will certainly come I think they may be a long way off but but that will depend it'll probably frankly depend on on experience in the first early months of the of the introduction in other than test situations and if if if they if they make the world safer it's going to be a very good thing but it won't be a good thing for auto insurers so take a word for that and for what it's worth couldn't agree more around the lengthy time it's it's going to be a little while by the time full autonomy is able to be introduced but the thing is what we're changing the game on here is by enabling these safety benefits to already start happening and on global production vehicles and this is where we're able to transform the industry and one of the big things and trends that's happening here from exactly what he was saying is something that is honestly completely over been historically completely overlooked which is massive disruption to insurance and we're proud to be able to to have Swiss Re as a collaborator here they're a a leader when it comes to insurance innovation they're the second largest reinsurer in the world you know globally reinsuring trillions of dollars of policies and with that we'd like to be able to welcome live Ali over video here is the global head of property and casually to solutions from Swiss free to be able to speak more about their safety research and the impact that it's had thank you very much thanks Austin thanks for having me sorry that I couldn't be there live with you on this exciting day and I think again everything that you mentioned and the comments on Warren Buffett absolutely resonate so before I go into the details of what we like our collaboration together I just want to take a step back and set the scene on how much of an opportunity are we talking about so as you know insurance market is usually divided into property and casual PNC as you highlighted in my title and life and health PNC property casualty is usually your car insurance your your house insurance and within that market segment auto basically is representing about 40 to 50% of of that that market segment we're talking about for example from a few years ago statistics of roughly over 700 billion US dollars of of motor premium around the world and us above 300 billion US dollars so it's a significant portion of our market and and of course Swiss Re being one of the top insurance companies in the world and us being in the business now over for over 150 years we have deep expertise in this segment and and a lot of background in in making sure that the risks are best captured and represented in the market now traditionally as I said over 150 years we've been in the risk transfer business providing products as reinsurance to to the market but more and more we've also partnering with our clients on on risk partnership and risk knowledge and that's where my business units Insurance solution comes in where we look into how we can bring our knowledge our deep expertise in in risk assessment in in underwriting and our expertise on the technology side together in providing solutions and and products that our customers can use to better assess the risk to make decisions smarter and and faster within my my area I have a team called AMS Automotive and and Mobility Solutions and this team has been now developing solutions for the auto segment of our insurance industry and our clients in for for many years one of the products that we have is called AV Risk Assessment Framework which is the subject of this conversation today and what this is is basically we've developed based on a large database of accidents and claims information a very comprehensive testing methodology that reflects the real life scenarios and accidents that can happen with the importance and weights of those accidents based on the information and data that we have so quite an an interesting product and quite a lot of you know excitement around it with Luminar and Austins team we started working over year ago to determine how can we actually bring the best of the two sides our capabilities and know how and the risk assessment and also with the fantastic technology that Luminar is developing LiDAR sensors as well as a software stack that goes with it and determine how we can show the the the fact that these systems are improving the risk landscape and improving the the safety of the cars on the road so what we did we started the journey by basically selecting a car and which was basically a model year 2003 and equipped it with the Luminar sensor and the Luminar software stack and started testing it for for the comprehensive testing protocols that we had and and recording the performance of this vehicle compared to the to the vehicle without the Luminar technology and with its own basically ADAS native ADAS system now the the cars that we chose this car and then a selection of number of other cars that we basically benchmarked against each other basically these are chosen to have basically the best inclass ADAS systems on them they're they're the newest model in the market with the best performance and just to give you an overview of where they stand compared to the inventory of the cars in the market right now in in the past years until 25 the estimate is that the new cars that will have ADAS systems of level 2 and above in the market would basically be around 30% of the new cars now the average car in the US is the has the age of 12 and a half years which means that the proportion of these cars with the ADAS system in the big population of cars on the road is still a very small portion and when we do the comparison to the best of the best you can imagine how you can basically extrapolate that to an average car so keep that in mind so we did the test on on this one vehicle and then it a fleet of different basically manufacturers equivalent car with with Advanced ADAS systems and benchmark the performance of these tests against each other we did over 800 tests and basically within 35 scenarios for all these cars and basically what's we observed and lots of that will be available for you to to look at in more detail was that the car with the Luminar LiDAR and software technology outperformed significantly the the the rest of the cars that we looked at just to give you a bit more of the of the details of of how much they they performed outperformed basically the the the car that was was equipped with the LiDAR system Luminar system compared to the original car that was basically didn't have the LiDAR system showed an improvement in the performance of 25% in avoiding accidents so basically frequency of of these events and about 29% in mitigating which means that the impact was reduced in the case of an accident so quite a jump from that perspective of all the cars that we did the comparison to the LiDAR car we we looked at all of the other ones and the top two cars in that in that group the comparison between the Luminar car and the other ones again were above 40% better than than the than the other ones in in in some cases than the force of impact and then what we did did was that we we created a fictitious car which which basically brings the best per performance across all of these cars that we looked at and this car of course we call it best performance performing vehicle it doesn't exist in reality it's best of the breed of the cars that we looked at and then compared to Luminar the car with the Luminar technology we saw that the car with Luminar technology performs 14% better in avoiding accidents and 15% in mitigating the impact in general overall so U very much impressive in terms of performance of what we saw on the cars compared to and again these are the cream of the crop best in class cars that we basically looked at and tested and exciting news and and we were really really happy to be a part of this work with you Austin absolutely well thank thank you Ali now this is fantastic stuff and thank you for sharing the results of this we know you guys have gone through a really extensive independent process over the course of the past year on this so very exciting seeing you know from the last Luminar day of when when they first announced this initiative to now seeing the results of all of this and the downstream implications you know of this so will be fantastic to be able to see and have an opportunity to disrupt the industry together so thank you Ali absolutely absolutely thank you very much Perfect all right well we'll appreciate it perfect great so give a little bit of some context into this with with Swiss Re and again just as a reference point in their study you know we mentioned some of this and this is now in a public report that their their accident database is based on statistics of over a billion vehicle years 70 million insurance claims so again just a summary of the study of a 20% reduction in frequency of accidents and other the accidents still happen reduction in severity by up to 40% and I think this is probably well beyond even you know some of the most aggressive estimates of what the kinds of impact that our technology could have in terms of safety performance on vehicles we're very excited to have this this data you know and the importance they shared with I mean a combination of everyone from consumers to automakers to insurers to everyone across the industry and we know that a lot of automakers have been waiting an eager anticipation of this safety report from Swiss Re so very excited to be able to get that out there and I think what this also highlights most importantly is that whereas historically LiDAR has really been thought of in the context of primarily autonomous driving systems you know and full autonomy systems it shows how LiDAR has a critical significance not just for enabling autonomous capabilities or even just higher level assisted driving capabilities but also even the most fundamental basic levels of vehicle active safety and this is why we believe this kind of technology will ultimately be standardized across the board and something that should be a fundamental right for every driver so if you take a look at the you know the kinds of camera comparisons and part of the reason of why we're able to perform so much better is it because we are able to accurately sense where objects are in true 3D space with a ground truth approach compared to cameras that really just guess from 2D data and not only that in other kinds of inclement weather conditions or even in at night we're able to see dramatically better all the way out you know past 250 meters into the distance for even you know very hard to see kinds of objects so this is something that's very significant we know exactly where everything is this ground truth view gives us the level accuracy and precision to be able to truly understand what's going on and that's that's the important that's the significance for all of this so what do these results mean economically when it comes to the insurance economics if you just take a little bit of a step back and just outlining a summary here on average you know the average annual us vehicle insurance premium is around $2500 per year as of today if you take a look and over that over the course of a average 10 year ownership span of a vehicle that's around $25,000 or you know what like half the purchase price of the average vehicle I mean it's it's crazy to see how impactful this is so here's the thing even a tiny percentage point improvement in safety makes a massive difference in terms of the economics here so you take a look at this like if you were to incorporate that data from Swiss Re into these kinds of economics you're talking about up to a $900 insurance savings you know per anum you know based on the data and over 10 years that's up to $9,000 in value savings when you think about it for a second you're like wait a minute $9,000 that's like 10x even the LiDAR itself you're absolutely right like these these numbers are incredibly impactful and I mean to talk about from a total cost of ownership perspective to have the LiDAR pay for itself I mean it would only be like a few percentage points much less 30% you know so that's that's the significance now of course how that $9,000 ultimately gets distributed to the consumer that's the question and how how that's died up accordingly but that's basically just a pure pool of profit of value that's created with every LiDAR sold that's able to have that level of performance and safety improvement so Luminar has actually taken steps in that direction to be able to capture that value or a portion thereof with every LiDAR sold and again we encourage all of this data to be shared with other kinds of insurers out there to already start incorporating this into their models and that's part of why Swiss Re is releasing it to all these other insurers and the insurance companies that they reinsure so as of today happy to say Luminar is now a licensed insurance agent in 12 states with plans to be able to have full coverage of the US and you know some regions internationally next year this is something that we've been able to do very efficiently with our key partners and of course you know talked all about Swiss Re about how they've done so much work and investment in kinds of in into this area and developing these kinds of capabilities but this enables us to be able to jointly capture that significant safety savings and value upside it's important to note that from the upside of all of this none of this is materially incorporated into any of our financial models into any of things like that so you know our business is not by any means dependent on this however it's a clear huge opportunity for further capitalizing now that we're actually getting these vehicles out on the road so we'll be able to actually insure you know for example EX90 that are equipped with Luminar with safety savings and significant profits so this isn't something that's just theoretical either in addition to you know the work with Swiss Re and the fundamental safety data underpinning we've already partnered with the first two digital you know insurance platforms to be able to distribute Luminar insurance and ultimately you know generating revenue with with these partners in the in the near term so very very excited just something illustrative as an example ultimately what the way that this would work is that when you talk about an insurance platform it won't necessarily always be you know labeled Luminar insurance is that you kind of you would have like a this is the technology platform you have in many of these scenarios like a white labeled back end of this where we're providing the policies where it's actually integrated into into the future it be would be integrated into the order forms you know for different automakers so for example if you're ordering you know any kind of Luminar equipped check a box get your quote within 30 seconds this is something that you know is not unfamiliar with folks that you know if you're ordering like a Tesla or other kinds of vehicles for example that give this as a reference point so very exciting development for all of this and some news for us that further exponentially scales our opportunity for for profits as we now get these vehicles out onto the road for each vehicle sold I'll also say that we are in you know consideration for multiple automakers and there's been a huge level of interest overall in particular in this insurance addition in addition to the LiDAR as having this as a packaged approach more generally and something that I think over the long term if you don't have an insurance product packaged with the LiDAR that's that's going to be a tough sell at least from a competitive standpoint point I'm specifically referring to if someone does and you know otherwise the business model today isn't fundamental to that but one thing I'd like to point out when it comes to these safety results and the impact of all of this have people are taking notice and you know we're very excited to be able to share these results with regulators as well and one important point overall is that when it comes to the regulatory landscape historically you know whereas Robo taxis have largely faced significant regulatory headwinds Luminar on the other hand has faced significant regulatory tailwinds and the importance of this is that it's very different when you have a car where you rip out the steering wheel braking systems try and get something approved you know to be able to get out on onto roads replacing drivers altogether you know you have everything from you know FMVSS standards to crackdowns from unions to all these other kinds of issues you know that are at play whereas even without prompting from from any kind of thing with with with Luminar and beyond you talk about you know folks like like NHTSA that are actually already taking huge step function improvements in terms of rule advancements which we're actually even expecting that there will be a a decree in the near term in terms of a massive step function improvement of a fundamental requirement for next generation AEB capabilities for automatic emergency braking which will be much needed and much welcome and ultimately most automakers admit that they won't be able to meet that and standardize that without a new hardware solution so that really leads up to you know four factors that are driving standardization of the technology you know there's the consumer demand for safer cars and the automotive brand value that's created from this for the automakers automotive adoption cycles and new technologies that naturally standardize over a period of time starting with some of the leading automakers like the Volvos and Mercedes of the world that historically introduce new systems before it trickles down to the rest of the industry regulatory pressure and mandates they timately be driving standardization and lastly reduction in the total cost of ownership of the vehicle and the insurance savings to be captured which you know already is a massive business case on its own each one of these reasons independently is already a factor for what will drive standardization but combined together it's inevitable so shifting gears a little bit one thing we want to talk through is a little bit about the technology foundation and ecosystem that we built over the years you know Luminar has invested around $1.8 billion to be able to develop the leading technology foundation for our industry
and this is something that is composed of a lot of different areas here of what's required to be able to successfully deliver into a production environment to meet these specifications and requirements to be able to set up the foundation for success for future technologies and products and the broader ecosystem so everything from LiDAR engineering to Luminar Semiconductor to software systems to industrialization to our IP leadership position to industrializing our supply chain to be automotive grade it's global OEM standards there's a lot of stuff that has to go into that and frankly there's no way you're doing half of this stuff without investing at least a billion dollars to successfully be able to develop this so the important point here though is that Luminar has made the investments that it needed to make now for the first time we get to ride the tailwinds of this investment to be able to successfully scale with our business introduce new these new technologies that we've invested previously to be able to develop and at the same time be able to substantially reduce costs overall for the business on an ongoing basis as a result of the B the the fundamental technology platform that we've created and this technology platform has resulted in an end to end ecosystem stack with both us and our partners that allows us to be able to truly deliver a massive value stream here of course a lot of the focus has been around these first three areas for the LiDAR but Luminar again does not just develop the LiDAR system so we work all the way from the semiconductor level up developing our own chips our own laser chips receiver chips you know processing chips and electronics that go into this and we'll be speaking more to that in a little bit here with with Jason as our Chairman of Luminar Semiconductor and then subsequently with the next gen LiDAR you know talk about the transceiver you know this is something that we we really designed developed and you know collaborate with faet as well for the production of this do the LiDAR system development collaborate with OEMs in terms of integration you know talk about series production we've effectively established you know a leadership position there with our global footprint you know software stack we're excited to be able to talk a lot more about that as well as an exciting new partnership that we have that we're announcing today you know we have our platform Partners from NVIDIA you know Mobileye you know Qualcomm ECARX as from a compute standpoint and beyond in the cases of some of those companies like like NVIDIA and Mobileye in particular from an OEM partner standpoint you know those are some of the the public ones there and then consumers you know we we're very excited to be able to now for the first time get this technology out of the road into the hands of consumers we're going to have again just as we're shipping more product out there into the world this is that watershed moment where there's going to be massive consumer visibility for the first time around this kind of technology you know people see this on the on the roof line of these Volvos it's you know a conversation starter and something that's a really important piece for this whole New Era so and then lastly of course we talked about insurance and the downstream effects of what improved safety can have on vehicles and how much economic opportunity there is as well as that being a fundamental driver for adoption from automakers as standardization from regulators as well as of course savings from an insurance standpoint so with all that we're going to do a little bit of a of a zoom in here into the software stack specifically with with Aaron Jefferson we're going to dive a little bit deeper into you know some AI developments with Annie and then with Jason as a Chairman of LSI we're going to jump into the into the chip developments as well there so with that love to be able to welcome up Aaron to speak more about our softare thank you Austin hello everyone the first thing you may notice is that have a little more gray than in that picture right there I assure you that it's not Luminar driven it's probably life and kids the very kids I'm trying to save are the kids that are trying to kill me but nevertheless I'm here today to talk to you about software and what we do with our software is really we take that 3D point cloud that rich data that we've always talked about and we translate that into actionable safety benefits for the vehicle we what we call our our software stack in our software suite a Sentinel and Sentinel consists of four key components core software perception and mapping functions or Proactive Safety and then tools and simulation let's dive into each of those so core is really just the software utilities that allow our customers to really utilize and and communicate with our like with our LiDAR some common ones are LiDAR drivers diagnostics and things of that nature but what you see here is what we call our Intelligent Horizon Tracking or Intelligent Region Of Interest Scanning system what that allows us to do is make sure that we put our dense points and our dense lines our density where it matters independent on if we hit a a pothole independent if we hit a a heel or we go up a any kind of embankment we basically want to make sure we have that information and that data exactly where it needs to be such that we don't lose sight of what's important and we can act on the data accordingly as we go from there we take all this point cloud information and we say okay what the hell do we do with this what does this mean so Perception is taking that data and then creating an environment model and we do that in two different methods we utilize a machine learning AI system that basically is based on a a foundational model that takes that information looks for a dynamic moving objects and use a semantic segmentation to classify each point within that scene so from there we can understand if it's a vehicle we can understand if it's a pedestrian we can understand it as a sign a lane and then we create this environment model based off that information next we use geometric say classical geometric algorithms where we're utilizing that 3D point cloud data we're taking in saying okay we understand what this is we're putting we're looking at dynamics of the objects persistence of the information we're putting bounding boxes around those and we're trying to understand exactly the six degrees of freedom where objects are heading and we're tracking that information we group those together we put them in a tracker and with that we create these we create object list this object list is is fundamentally redundant and is also algorithmically sufficient to then enable autonomy as well as safety so that is the foundation of bringing everything together and creating this environment model with our Perception system in addition to that we can take that 3D data and that send semantic information and create 3D multi-layer maps that really gives us an a real scene and understanding of what's going on in the environment in addition to that we have a low bandwidth localization layer utilizing our fingerprint technology that really allows us to run this on the cloud or in a vehicle and understand exactly where we are actually better than RTK or realtime kinematic systems and GPS systems today usually in dense cities tall buildings you lose sight of the GPS systems lose side of where it is very a lot of tolerance there that you don't want and so so our system is able to really localize the system again for support all the way from safety through autonomy and really drive that capability on a vehicle and then all that builds up to what we call Proactive Safety Proactive Safety is as a product person what I really love because I want to be able to tell my customer how great our LiDAR is I want to be able to show these nice point clouds but I don't want them I don't want to say hey please believe me it works it's going to translate into a vehicle function I really want to be able as a team to be able to go to a customer and say hey this is what it does and take a vehicle like you'll see later today and show you kinematically what the vehicle can do with this technology and that's what we have here and so you know as the market shifts from say camera camera radar fusion systems today we can improve our AEB system our safety systems higher speed inclement weather safety maneuvers we can make safer maneuvers over time and then also we can implement better highway assisted driving higher speeds more availability again and inclement weather and things of that nature we can make sure that our system is always ready to go to make all this work our tools and simulation this is what we use to basically validate our software and then we also utilize these systems so our customers can put it within their systems and make sure that they understand what our LiDAR can do it is a tool that helps us validate our capability but then helps the consumer or the customer integrate our capability into their system and really deliver a full software solution so we're excited to be able to develop this Sentinel solution you know we we want to be able to make sure that we have a solution that is ready for the market that we are developing such that we're not only proven out our software capability but we're delivering a solution to our customers that they can utilize and put into their programs next we're going to take a deeper dive into AI with Annie [Applause] yeah hi I'm Anie Guan I lead Ai and Machine Learning at Luminar as Aaron presented earlier our software transformed the 3D LiDAR point data into real sa
2024-04-28 16:45
