Lidar-Maker Luminar Files For Bankruptcy (theverge.com) 30
Once a star of the self-driving hype cycle, lidar maker Luminar has filed for bankruptcy amid legal turmoil, layoffs, and a cooling autonomous-vehicle market. It plans to sell off its assets before shutting down entirely. The Verge reports: As part of its bankruptcy, Luminar is seeking permission to sell both its lidar and semiconductor businesses, the latter of which it has already agreed to sell to Quantum Computing for $110 million. The company plans to continue to operate during the bankruptcy proceedings "to minimize disruptions and maintain delivery of its LiDAR hardware and software." That said, Luminar will cease to exist once the process is complete. "As we navigate this process, our top priority is to continue delivering the same quality, reliability and service our customers have come to expect from us," CEO Paul Ricci said in a statement.
After launching in 2017, Luminar muscled its way to the front of the autonomous vehicle industry as a top maker of lidar systems, a key technology that driverless cars use to sense the shapes and distances of objects around them. Luminar has sold sensors to Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, Audi, Toyota Research Institute, Caterpillar, and even Tesla, which has dismissed lidar sensors in favor of traditional cameras. The company was valued at nearly $3 billion when it went public through a reverse merger with a SPAC in 2020.
After launching in 2017, Luminar muscled its way to the front of the autonomous vehicle industry as a top maker of lidar systems, a key technology that driverless cars use to sense the shapes and distances of objects around them. Luminar has sold sensors to Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, Audi, Toyota Research Institute, Caterpillar, and even Tesla, which has dismissed lidar sensors in favor of traditional cameras. The company was valued at nearly $3 billion when it went public through a reverse merger with a SPAC in 2020.
Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
I guess they didn't see that coming.
I bet Elon is smirking over this bit of news and.. (Score:3)
$TSLA rose 3.5% today
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What happened, is their six millionth robotaxi out on the road already?
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The same Elon whose cars utterly underperform in safety tests compared to their peers during fog, heavy rain, or sunlight glare?
$TSLA has been devoid of any reality for a long time. Their share price at this point is meaningless noise.
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I have a Cybertruck and am running v14.2.1.25 FSD. I live in the frozen North and, right now, the roads are a combination of slush, snow, and ice. Road markings, for the most part, are buried under snow, except for major highways which are scraped clean(ish) by snow plows.
This morning, just like every morning last week, FSD took me from home to work (around an hour each way) with no intervention. This is despite some serious sun glare and some heavy snowfall on Thu
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That's not terrible news, that's an anecdote biased by someone with skin in the game. Congrats on having no interventions. I really hope for you it stays like that. But as it stands vision alone is outperformed technically by vision + lidar / radar. That's a simple technical fact. And side by side tests have shown that Tesla's have problems in some situations that other cars don't.
There's no doubt that Tesla's capabilities are some of the most advanced on the market outside of actual self driving companies.
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I also don't care for Elon as a person - but by the same token, I don't know him personally. I'm utterly indifferent to him as a human. But I do love my Cybertruck and my Model Y. Before my Cybertruck, I loved my Model S. This might make it seem like I'm a Tesla fanboy but I've owned 50+ cars in the last 40 years. Yes, I change my vehicles a LOT or at least I used to. I owned my Model S for longer
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I really don't have any skin in the game.
You use the product, one that has killed people. You have literally have your skin in the game.
All I'm saying is, be safe. Elon has pushed a sub-par hardware with software that overstates its performance. Some people are already dead because of it. There's a reason they STILL haven't gotten approval to consider FSD a L2 self driving system in Europe despite their shills and Elon himself claiming its level 4.
Stay safe. It's a great system, but don't trust it with your life. People have made that mistake.
Room scanning. (Score:2)
Kind of a shame Lidar can be for more than just autonomous vehicles.
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Diversification is not just for portfolio managers, it also helps companies survive to do business another day..
"Cooling market"? (Score:3)
Looking around, they didn't see that coming (Score:2)
Reality can be crushing.
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Betting The Company Gone Wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Luminar bet their company on a promise from Volvo that the EX90 would launch on time and have a certain sales volume. The EX90 was several years late and an engineering dumpster fire that nobody is buying. So sadly, their demise is pretty directly Volvo's fault (and before you go all racist and say "but the Chinese", no, it was idiots in Sweden that made prophetic declarations about how their SPA2 platform would be glorious without knowing how computers actually work and ended up making a car that (big surprise) didn't work.
It's a shame. I had the luck to work with a Luminar Iris lidar and it was pretty cool. Its disappointing to see them end like this.
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Well almost. The idiots in Sweden would have been right, it's just their engineering was rushed and the QA was completely absent. The actual SPA2 platform and its idea was quite sound, and by all accounts should have been glorious.
I bet you the release date of the car was decided by someone with an accounting degree.
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This is true, and I didn't mean to imply the entire platform was bad and always would be. The theory is great, and it should have become a model for the industry if it were well executed. There were fundamental issues with transitioning from hard realtime automotive microcontrollers in a domain based architecture to the soft realtime world of QNX, task scheduling, and the realities and limitations of Nvidia AGX Xavier in a centralized architecture that hurt a lot. Real QA was largely absent, as it was de
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Yeah my point was more it would have been a solid and intelligent bet to make. Volvo had a pretty good track record. Their vehicles were always incredibly popular. But the EX90 is just a turd in every possible metric. It may go down as one of Volvo's worst ever quality cars.
Re:Betting The Company Gone Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
But also Chinese LIDAR companies made rapid advances, especially when it comes to cost reduction and software that mitigates the slightly less capable hardware. It's still not clear how LIDAR will feature in self driving cars, but it looks like the low cost systems will probably be part of the solution.
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Volvo claimed the Luminar was having problems with software and hardware delivery, so they cancelled the deal.
https://www.carscoops.com/2025... [carscoops.com]
From the link above (and other sites) :
In November, Volvo made the sudden announcement that it the 2026 ES90 and EX90 models would no longer be offered with a LiDAR sensor, attributing the decision to customer demand and “due to limited supply of the lidar hardware.” It also claimed that Luminar had failed to meet its contractual obligations.
Some other li
The persistent myth (Score:2)
You will find an "opinion" that is endlessly repeated in many forums (including right here) that it is impossible to build a fully autonomous driving system unless you are using LIDAR. It isn't true and Tesla has pretty much proved it by this point.
I wonder how much of Luminar's business plan was based on this myth.
However there are a lot of other applications for LIDAR. Not as glamorous maybe but certainly enough to support positive cash flow.
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Re:The persistent myth doomed to fail (Score:2)
Are you talking about the part where he said LIDAR-based systems were "doomed to fail?"
I'm not saying he is right. But I don't see him admitting anything like what you are saying he is.
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Re: The persistent myth (Score:1)
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One doesn't even need stereo cameras. There are many people with only one working eye, driving cars and it is something one can easily verify, by closing one eye while driving. So the lidar myth is a really pathetic one.
Seeing isn't the issue. It's processing what you see. When someone loses an eye their mind compensates for this. As people on here keep reminding us, AI/LLM/whatever doesn't think. It doesn't adapt. Lidar at least presents the software with a physical presence of an object ahead, something cameras don't do. That's software which is highly prone to missteps.
It's why Teslas keep plowing into emergency vehicles [carcomplaints.com] and killing people.
Re: The persistent myth (Score:1)
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You don't need to "think", whatever you think that is, to do depth from motion processing. You don't even need it to do contextual range estimation from still images. There are perfectly good old fashioned engineered solutions for both. Learning algorithms just let you do it faster by learning some shortcuts.
Re:The persistent myth (Score:4, Insightful)
You will find an "opinion" that is endlessly repeated in many forums (including right here) that it is impossible to build a fully autonomous driving system unless you are using LIDAR. It isn't true and Tesla has pretty much proved it by this point.
Telsa has precisely zero fully self driving autonomous miles on record. Not even their robotaxis have driven anywhere without a driver, and even in that time they have had many issues.
The fundamental issue with Muskworship is that you can't see the forest through the trees. The point is not that we can't eventually get cars to drive like humans using just vision alone, that is an engineering certainty. The point is that THIS SHOULD NOT BE OUR GOAL. Human drivers fucking suuuuuuck.
As it stands Tesla has the *worst* performing driver assistance systems in torrential rain and heavy fog, situations where LIDAR and RADAR has no problem with. It never ceases to amaze me that people hold up Musk's vision while neglecting to see that he has set the bar for his tech stupidly low. Don't believe me? Ask Naibel Benavides Leon, but you'll need to ask him about his experience with FSD using a Ouija board.
In the meantime some of Tesla's competitors are using LIDAR centrally in their platforms, have millions of self driving miles on record and have a body count of zero.
I wonder how much of Luminar's business plan was based on this myth.
Luminar's primary customer was Volvo and they had an incredibly (LIDAR unrelated) disaster of a launch of their LIDAR included vehicles. They are a victim of another company's fuckup.
Re:The persistent myth (Score:4, Informative)
You will find an "opinion" that is endlessly repeated in many forums (including right here) that it is impossible to build a f
How has Tesla proven that with their non-autonomous driving system (It's not even level 4, let alone 5) that mistakes the side of a semi trailer for the sky and drives under it?
Wow... Paul Ricci... (Score:2)
That's a name I haven't heard in a long time. Had to look at his bio on the Luminar web site to make sure it's the same guy. It is. I worked at the Xerox division he ran. He was an absolute head case and anyone who worked there could tell you stories about this arrogant clown. He ran AODS (Advanced Office Document Systems is what the division was originally called) into the ground and I'm not surprised he has another bankruptcy under his belt.