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Happy new year from Velodyne Lidar, which is now offering the VLP-16 lidar Puck to customers around the world “for up to a 50 percent cost reduction.” This puts the price floor of the 600-gram lidar sensor at a lowly $4,000.
Velodyne CEO David Hall explained the move by saying that demand for the popular lidar sensor grew significantly in 2017, allowing the company to scale up production capacity at the megafactory it built last January. This increased capacity, in turn, means that each individual sensor costs less to make. Hall explains that Velodyne has decided to “pass along savings as a cost reduction to [its]customers.”
Hall said that Velodyne wants to “make 2018 a year of optimism for the autonomous vehicle, especially as the first waves of robocabs hit the road. Our goal is the democratization of transportation safety by making it accessible to every man, woman, and child in the world as quickly as possible.”
The price cut is good news for users outside of the autonomous vehicle industry, too. These less expensive sensors will be more accessible at their lower price point, and less expensive to experiment with.
For more information about the sensor, see Velodyne Lidar’s product page for the VLP-16 Puck.
