- [Man] Hit it.
(horn beeps)
Yeah, stay behind it.
(car beeps)
- You know, the experience is almost shocking.
It's something that's surreal that your cars will just let
you run into the thing right in front of you.
They should be able to detect the object, the person,
whatever it is, that's crossing your path.
And the reality is humans are not perfect.
You know, these things happen all the time
in very unfortunate circumstances and accidents.
I think it's the responsibility of the automaker of these
technology providers to be able to actually change that,
to be able to make a difference and to be able
to solve that last 1%.
- [Christoph] What we observe these days in the industry is that
companies mostly focus on developing robo taxis
that would operate without a driver
in a level four, level five fashion,
active safety features have taken a back seat.
We don't believe that this is the right approach.
We believe that there's a lot of undiscovered value in
providing extremely safe, almost uncrashable vehicles.
- Proactive Safety for us is really
all about preventing accidents
Today's systems, and you see this as an example over here,
today's systems really focus on mitigating collisions.
They maybe detect them in time.
They're usually detected way too late,
and then they do something to mitigate the impact
and severity of the crash.
Obviously that's not enough.
You need to make sure that whatever you build gets
to a stop in time and the baseline for it is, really,
preventing collisions here on this test track
in those very simple situations.
If you can't solve this,
it's pretty much impossible to solve autonomy
on a big scale, especially in the urban environments.
The automotive industry has a standard test catalog
by which active safety features are being evaluated.
It's called NCAP, NCAP is an organization
that defines those tests and sets the bar.
The bar is set very, very low at this point in time.
The test cases, the scenarios that are set up
are easy to solve scenarios.
They are focused towards legacy sensors
like radars and cameras.
We wanted to compare how well do we do
versus one of the most respected brands
in the ADAS/AD world.
(car beeping)
(dummy thuds)
(dummy thuds) (car beeping)
(dummy thuds)
(car beeping)
(dummy thuds)
We've seen today very consistent behavior,
but, unfortunately, the wrong type of consistent behavior,
the car basically did not brake at all.
On the other hand side,
we also saw our Hydra powered Proactive Safety system.
The car was approaching the objects
with a velocity of 50 or 60 kph
and in every case broke for it in time to come
to a safe stop and not hit the pedestrian.
- I'm actually old enough to remember a time
where seatbelts in Germany were not mandatory.
Some of the cars didn't even have them.
So I remember that phase,
and it was a pretty long phase,
where people actually were hesitant of putting
that thing on.
There were newspaper articles, "is that really safe?
Is it not safe?"
- I've been driving 15 years.
I've never had an accident or a moving violation.
Besides, messes up the clothes.
- We went through this phase and it was very clear
that seatbelts were the thing to have
and they would really make you safe in a crash.
The discussion that we're currently seeing
with companies saying,
"you can do level four with radar only,
you can do level four with camera only,
you can do level four with Lidar"
is exactly that kind of discussion.
I see a couple of really similar traits to that,
and I think what's going to come out of it is you really
want the best solution that will enable
to give you the best road safety.
And we believe that that's Lidar and Luminar Lidar
to be specific.
Over the last decade or so,
there has been a lot of work in bringing driver assistance
from something that will purely assist the driver,
towards really autonomous driving.
What that gives us as a technology puzzle piece,
is a massively powerful safety and accident prevention step.
(light piano music)