[michaelt]

Interestingly, there have been people in the LIDAR industry predicting costs like this for many years. I heard numbers like $250 per vehicle back in 2012 [1]

Of course, ambitious pricing like this is all about economies of scale - sensors that are used in production vehicles are ordered by the million, and that lowers the costs massively. When the huge orders didn't materialise, the economies of scale and low prices didn't materialise either.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161013165833/http://content.us...

[small_model]

Also 'Luminar Technologies, a prominent U.S. lidar manufacturer, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2025' LIDAR is useful in a small set of scenarios (calibration and validation) but do not bet the farm on it or make it the centre piece of your sensor suite.

[StephenSmith]

Also, MicroVision, the company in OP's article bought the IP from Luminar. This feels like a circular venture capital scam. Luminar originally went public via SPAC and made a bunch of people very wealthy before ultimately failing.

[UltraSane]

This is very wrong. LIDAR scanners have revolutionized surveying by enabling rapid, high-precision 3D mapping of terrain and infrastructure, capturing millions of data points per second. LIDAR can penetrate dense vegetation, allowing accurate, ground-level, mapping in forested or obstructed areas. Drone mounted LIDAR has become very popular. Tripod mounted LIDAR scanners are very commonly used on construction sites. Handhels LIDAR scanners can map the inside of buildings with incredible accuracy. This is very commonly used to create digital twins of factories.

[schiffern]

The same Luminar from the Mark Rober video?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2025/03/17/youtub...

[UltraSane]

Lidar is critical for any autonomous vehicle. It turns out a very accurate 3D point cloud of the environment is very useful for self driving. Crazy, I know.

[newsclues]

Economies of scale when they are in phones?