Hesai Technology, the global leader in lidar safety technology for automotive and robotics applications, announced that they have been selected by Baidu to be the exclusive long-range lidar supplier for its next-generation robotaxi platform Yichi 06.
Baidu’s Apollo Go 5th generation robotaxis, which is currently in operation in Wuhan and other cities in China, already uses Hesai’s Pandar series high-performance lidar as the main lidar. Just this year, the sixth-generation Apollo Go autonomous vehicles will also be deployed to the market.
According to Baidu, the 6th generation vehicle’s cost has dropped by 60% compared with the previous generation, to a price point of only around $28,500.
According to Yole’s “Lidar for Automotive 2024” report, Hesai dominated the global robotaxi lidar market in 2023, comprising an impressive 74% share of the current $124 million market. Among the top ten L4 autonomous driving companies globally, nine of them, including Zoox, NVIDIA and Nuro, use Hesai’s high-performance lidar. Building off the company’s success, Hesai’s total lidar shipment volume has exceeded 380,000 units as of the first quarter of this year.
“The autonomous driving industry has rapidly evolved in recent years and today’s surge of autonomous driving in China is a testament to the breakthroughs we’ve made in smart driving,” said David Li, CEO & Co-Founder of Hesai. “Advanced sensors like lidar are accelerating the adoption of autonomous driving.”
Hesai has already established a strong global business presence in the US, Europe, and Asia with customers spanning over 40 countries, extending support and engineering resources across the globe to facilitate close collaboration with customers, and further enabling safe and reliable intelligent driving worldwide.
