Europe’s most outspoken tech boss dishes the dirt on lidar

"Let's go to the end game, level five: you no longer have to pay insurance, because you will pay the car company, and you get a chauffeur.

"I agree that to get to 30% and 50% of the market, it needs to get cheaper. Will it get there? Absolutely, no doubt."

On the relative simplicity of lidar and how to cut costs

"If you open the box, you will be surprised how simple it is. 

"We have our own ASIC chip, which is about $40, but that's because that's in low volume, right? There's nothing in there that is fundamentally expensive. In the future, there will be more circuit-integrated components. Today you see many, many discrete parts. That’s because that OEM wants this field of view, that OEM wants this resolution, that OEM wants this size and connected with this internet.

"There's no standard right now. I need to keep the system very agile, and flexibility is cost, right? Once I start to print this 10 million times and the cost of saving $2 is an investment of $2,000,000, I will do that, right? That’s industrialisation."

On using too much computing power and energy

"It's easier to process lidar data than camera. If you look at Tesla, the first translation of the camera is to make it 3D, because machine vision requires 3D understanding. I can use a very small part of the picture. The number of pixels I need to process to translate is significantly lower, because it's not a big image in high resolution. I can use significantly less processing power to determine whether it's a truck, car or human being."

On why Chinese cars have so many lidars

"In China, you will find many cars driving with lidars at level two, and I would say 'why do you need it?'. You don't need redundancy; you have the driver observing and ready to react if something happens. 

"I think that the Chinese have used lidars to leapfrog some of the hurdles they had with the software. I actually expect that they will use less lidars over time, because their software will mature.

"Once you go to level three, you can't be in a situation like in level two, when the lidar can be reset every five minutes if it has a bug. At level two, who cares? It's not good, but you can actually go to the market. The driver is responsible and you can have any problem you might think of. "

On how China is helping Innoviz

"China is creating a crystal ball that allows the West to understand where it needs to go. They are fitting their cars with higher grades, so then the West understand that they need to get there faster; they know that they can't stand behind too long. For me, China is just a good way to create sense of urgency."

On why Chinese lidars ultimately can’t win in the West

"They are only domestic. Up until now, they haven't managed to succeed outside of China, because of the regulation. Lidar is very sensitive in terms of creation of maps, and so there's a very high tariff to buy Chinese lidars in the US.

"No OEMs in the West are going use Chinese lidars for their vehicles. Israel is the Switzerland of lidars: we can sell to anyone. We don’t meet the requirements for military uses, we don't have a problem selling in China and obviously we don't have a problem selling in the US."

On the lack of competition outside China

"Out of China, I don't have real competitors. In China, I will have a challenge to win in the domestic market against competitors like Hesai. But that’s waste of time: domestic OEMs are not willing to pay money; they would go with domestic lidars."

On the likelihood that Chinese lidar makers are getting state support

"I open the box and their product is more expensive than mine and they're selling it at a cheaper price. How do they do it? I have no idea. If you talk to a car company, they will say the same thing about the cars they see from China. We don't understand how they sell it in the prices they sell it. So for sure they have been funded. I don't know how. But anyway, it doesn't matter. We are lucky, in a way, that they can't sell outside of China. For me, it works well."

On when Innoviz will be profitable

"We make money not only through the sales of lidars. if I only sell lidars, then I need to sell around 200,000, and obviously we're not there yet. But as a tier-one supplier in the space, I get a lot of money for my development. So we just announced two weeks ago that we closed an NRE [non-recurring engineering] payment plan for around $80 million from an OEM, although the real number is actually closer to $100m; $100m of NRE is more than a year of funding for the company."