It's all about technology.
If you want to sell a car, it's not about going from point A to point B anymore.
It's not about leather seats anymore.
It's about what you have in the car.
And Luminar is at the forefront
of the technology that you can bring into the safety of the vehicles.
The hard part is what the company has already done, innovate
and bring together a piece of technology that is unambiguously better
than anybody else's.
Now, of course, having said that, the pre-production stages can be quite
difficult.
It will be an amazing success at the other end of it.
The product development itself is going super well
and we're on track to be production ready by the end of this year.
Two months in the company, I can tell you that I can see this through very easily.
Automotive, as I said, is one of the toughest manufacturings.
It's been around for a long, long time.
You have to be able to scale the company
as we build and get more and more business, obviously.
Our business is growing,
we're signing on new customers.
Our existing customers
are giving us more volume, so we have to be ready to do that.
We're delighted with the current two manufacturing partners that we have
and the ramp up of those manufacturing lines is on track.
Our high volume manufacturing development is on track,
and that high volume development is going to get up to about a quarter
of a million units per year, locked and loaded.
Today, we're at Calvary Robotics in upstate New York.
Calvary is really a world leader in robotics, automation, material handling
and we partnered with Calvary Robotics just because of their experience
in automotive.
We're jointly designing and building assembly lines for automating the assembly
of our lidar product.
Calvary at this point is in the final stages of the assembly line
and what you'll see here is an
is an essential part of realizing that next step in our execution.
What we have here is one of several lines that we are building
in this assembly hall.
So we have a dedicated hall where all our lines are being built.
We have dispensing, we have screw driving, we have inspections.
All of those operations occur at the different stations.
At this particular station here, we have an inspection camera
where we're actually inspecting materials that was dispensed on the sensor
in a previous step.
And as we continue, we have again, additional value added steps.
Dispensing robot that does specific adhesives
or thermal compounds that we use in the product.
This entire line is gonna be in the clean room.
So a lot of attention, a lot of care in terms of how do you design equipment,
how do you build equipment that's compatible with a clean room?
Many considerations in terms of materials, rounded corners,
particle debris that are potentially generated by things like conveyors.
So we have all clean room conveyors, ESD safe.
And then also very important, is process controls
a lot of sensors, a lot of IO, a lot of detection of potential conditions
that would cause the line
not to operate for a nominal procedure to make sure that our product is safe.
We designed this line
for a rate of roughly a quarter million units per year in terms of capacity,
and then be able to even replicate this in different parts of the world.
To have the consistent output, no matter where we are, is very important.
We're looking forward to installing this in our brand new facility
in Monterrey, Mexico.
For the last, upwards of about six years, we have been working on industrializing
lidar for the cars.
And that's one of the reasons that I can tell honestly that
we have achieved the performance and leadership in the industry.
This is the company that can bring that entire
sensing technology to the world so it's ubiquitously available
and help people save lives and at the same time
go from point A to point B in a much more comfortable way.