Velodyne shipped 30,000 LiDARs since it started making them, generating cumulative sales of $500 million,
“I don’t see an urgency to expand our Level 4, Level 5 offerings, whereas we’re seeing a lot of enthusiasm for blind spot and the ADAS stuff. … You can get some much bigger revenue from this path than you can with the Level 4, Level 5 today.”
Its highly automated 200,000-square-foot “megafactory” in San Jose, California, gave it more production capacity than any competitor—for now at least.
Nikon is also setting up a lidar assembly line in Japan in partnership with Velodyne, and it has a strategic licensing deal with Veoneer, a unit of Swedish auto parts giant Autoliv, to help boost production of its sensors to millions of units a year worldwide, Hall said.