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By Meg Flippin, Benzinga
Keep a look out for more Aeva Technologies Inc. announcements here.
From self-driving trucks that can safely achieve highway speeds to autonomous vehicles that can easily navigate cities, Aeva Technologies Inc.’s (NYSE: AEVA) Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) 4D LiDAR technology is breaking barriers, enabling its growing customer base to go where they have never gone before.
Aeva’s advanced LiDAR technology uses a low-power continuous laser beam to measure range and velocity simultaneously, which it says unlocks new levels of safety and automation by instantaneously discriminating between moving and non-moving points and knowing the precise velocity of objects in motion. Instant velocity data gives real-time insight into how an object’s position changes, giving the vehicle’s computer a more accurate picture to help plan its next move.
These sensors can also achieve highway speeds and do it safely. It’s something that’s eluded the industry so far, with many vehicles with automated driving functionality only achieving top speeds of 35 to 45 MPH, which is sub-optimal for highway driving. For the automotive industry to move to autonomous vehicles, it must sustain tackling city streets and importantly highway speeds safely.
Reimaging Self-Driving Trucks for Safety At Scale
It’s the reason Daimler Truck AG and Torc Robotics, an independent subsidiary of Daimler Truck, tapped Aeva to power its self-driving trucks of the future and enable a highway driving operational design domain (ODD). The world's largest commercial vehicle manufacturer recently inked a multi-year OEM deal with Aeva with an estimated order book of $1 billion in which Daimler is using Aeva’s sensors in its Class 8 Freightliner Cascadia autonomous truck platform.
These are heavy-duty trucks that spend most of their time on interstates hauling cargo to and from major logistics hubs. The industry sees heavy-duty trucking as an area rife for autonomous vehicles given the severe shortages of drivers in that segment of the market. “There’s a strong need for something that drives on interstates at high speeds of 65 miles per hour,” says Peter Vaughan Schmidt, CEO of Torc. “That’s the problem Torc is trying to solve and found a solution with Aeva.”
For self-driving heavy-duty trucks to become a reality, Schmidt says they have to be ultra-precise in understanding their environment so they can react and plan ahead, and that’s what he said Aeva’s sensors enable. That, Aeva says, is achieved through things like Ultra Resolution, a real-time camera-level image that provides up to twenty times the resolution of legacy LiDAR sensors. Another key feature of Aeva’s technology is its small road hazard detection at highway speeds. Aeva says it can detect hazards twice the distance of what is possible today. All told its sensors can see 500 meters away. On top of all that, Aeva’s FMCW technology is resistant to interference from sunlight and other LiDAR sensors, including Aeva sensors, ensuring performance across a wider set of lighting conditions and when used near other LiDAR-equipped vehicles.
“We are designing to scale by year 2027 and it doesn’t mean prototype trucks, it means you can go to a Freightliner dealer and buy a Cascadia Truck,” says Schmidt.
Navigating City Streets Safely
But Daimler Truck and Torc aren’t the only ones that are tapping Aeva’s LiDAR sensors to take their autonomous driving platforms to the next level. May Mobility, the Ann Arbor, Michigan, company which makes self-driving cars for cities around the world, is also turning to Aeva to realize its safe self-driving plans.
What May Mobility says sets it apart is its focus on creating self-driving technology that can safely handle the unexpected and plan for what may happen next on a city street. That enables the vehicles to drive safely in any situation no matter how unique. To make it a reality, May Mobility, which counts Toyota Motor Corp. (NYSE: TM) as a customer, selected Aeva to be the exclusive supplier of long-range LiDAR sensors for May Mobility’s autonomous vehicles globally. The multi-year supply agreement provides five-year volume commitments through 2028, with deliveries already begun last year and production ramping in 2025.
“Aeva’s long-range 4D LiDAR technology provides unique and exciting new capabilities for our autonomous stack and aligns well with our technology and commercialization roadmap,” Edwin Olson, co-founder and CEO at May Mobility, said when announcing the deal.
“We’re thrilled to partner with Aeva on our mission to reimagine transportation by developing and deploying autonomous vehicles that get people where they need to go safely and easily.”
More To Come For Passenger Vehicles?
Earlier this week, Aeva announced that a major European Passenger OEM selected Aeva’s 4D LiDAR for its automated vehicle validation program. The OEM will leverage Aeva’s FMCW technology, with its instant velocity data, to gather real-world data, to benchmark and validate its next-generation vehicle automation and assisted driving systems.
In addition, Aeva has said it is engaged and progressing on multiple ongoing production program RFQs with global top-10 passenger OEMs, suggesting more vehicle manufacturers are looking to leverage Aeva’s FMCW LiDAR for their production vehicle programs to enable new capabilities for advanced driver assistance and autonomous systems. The company has said that some of these OEMs are expected to make award decisions in the coming months.
A new major passenger vehicle manufacturer adopting Aeva’s technology in its production vehicles can be a potential massive boost for the company and cement the shift in the industry to its FMCW-based perception technology that the company has been talking about.
From heavy-duty trucks to robotaxis, and increasingly passenger vehicles at mass scale, Aeva is helping its customers go beyond what they imagined before, thanks to its advanced 4D LiDAR and perception software technology. Learn more about Aeva Technologies Inc. by checking out its investors deck here.
Featured photo by Emmanuel Acua on Unsplash.
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