Tech prodigy eyes more accurate car sensor
Luminar’s ambitions for self-driving cars are about to be tested
SAN FRANCISCO — Austin Russell, now 22, was barely old enough to drive when he set out to create a safer navigation system for robot-controlled cars. His ambitions are about to be tested.
Five years ago, Russell cofounded Luminar Technologies, a Silicon Valley startup trying to steer the rapidly expanding selfdriving car industry in a new direction. Luminar kept its work closely guarded until Thursday, when the startup revealed the first details about a product Russell is touting as a far more powerful form of “lidar,” a key sensing technology used in autonomous vehicles designed by Google, Uber and major automakers.
Lidar systems work by bouncing lasers off nearby objects and measuring the reflections to build up a 3-D picture of the surrounding environment. The technology is similar to radar, which uses radio waves instead of lasers.
Russell says Luminar’s version, consisting of its own patented hardware and software, will provide 50 times more resolution and 10 times the range of current lidar systems. Those improvements, he said, will enable self-driving cars to be sold on the mass market more quickly.
During an interview in an empty warehouse on a San Francisco pier where Luminar has been testing its lidar, Russell wasn’t shy about making big claims for its technology. “When you see your vehicle is powered by Luminar, you will know you will be safer,” he said. “We need to get to the point where humans don’t have to constantly babysit and take control” of autonomous cars.
If Luminar’s lidar lives up to its promise, some of the world’s biggest technology and auto companies may have been upstaged by a precocious entrepreneur who says he memorized all the periodic table of the elements when he was two years old. By the time he turned 11, Russell says he was tinkering with supercomputers.
Like another technology prodigy — Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg — Russell won the early support of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who became a billionaire after investing $500,000 US in Facebook during the company’s infancy.
One of Luminar’s early investors is a venture capital firm backed by Thiel and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Russell also dropped out of Stanford University after just three months when he won a Thiel fellowship, which pays students $100,000 US to work on promising ideas instead of pursuing a degree.
Also like Zuckerberg, Russell is CEO of his company. Most of Luminar’s 150 employees are older than him, including his former mentor in photonics, 45-year-old Jason Eichenholz, now the company’s chief technology officer.
Now Russell will have to prove he has indeed invented something revolutionary.
While lidar is a key component in self-driving cars, some believe Luminar may be working on the wrong problem. The big issue for lidar systems these days is cost, not safety, said Alex Lidow, CEO of Efficient Power Conversion, which supplies chips for lidar.
“You don’t need the resolution that would allow a car to stop before a bug hits its windshield,” Lidow said. “The question comes down to, what is the exact right amount of information for the car to make exactly the right decision all the time?”
Luminar plans to being manufacturing 10,000 lidar units at a 50,000-square-foot plant in Orlando, Fla., this year. About 100 of the lidar systems will be tested by four makers of autonomous cars.
Luminar will be competing against other lidar suppliers such as Velodyne and Quanergy Systems, which have each raised $150 million US. Velodyne’s backers include Ford Motor, which invested $75 million US. By comparison, Luminar has raised $36 million US.