How a billion dollar autonomous vehicle startup lost its way

Oh, Quanergy, the vaporware LIDAR company. &quot;Quanergy is the leading provider of solid state LiDAR sensors and smart sensing solutions.&quot; They announced a flash LIDAR in 2016, but don&#x27;t seem to have shipped the product.<p>I expect that Continental, the German auto parts company, will be the winner here. They bought Advanced Scientific Concepts, which makes good but expensive flash LIDAR units for military and space applications. Now they have to make them cheaper and in volume, which is what auto parts companies do. They already have some shorter-range, lower resolution LIDAR products on the market for anti-collision systems, so they have experience with the automotive LIDAR environment.<p>Delco, the US auto parts maker, is also working on self-driving components, including LIDAR. They&#x27;re not saying much, but they have a California autonomous vehicle testing license and some cars on the road. Bosch also has a self driving car in test. It&#x27;s entirely possible that self-driving will just be an auto part, sourced from the usual big auto parts makers.

I suspect this will be a fairly regular story in the next few months&#x2F;years. Self-driving tech seems to be a lot further off than people think so a lot of companies that were formerly very exciting will not be able to deliver and will need to close up shop. I think there&#x27;s some possibility that it will go the way of flying cars at least for now.<p>Fortunately a lot of the tech that does work can find a second life as progressive enhancement for human drivers. Blind spot detection, auto lane following, and smart cruise control are great features that ease some of the burden in driving and I think it&#x27;s good to see them being more widely distributed in newer cars.

I&#x27;m not saying this is as extreme a case, but I got a whiff of similarity to Theranos, in the aspect of an emphasis on loyalty making it difficult for the CEO to listen to debate. Of course, that could also be because the journalists covering tech businesses nowadays are looking for the next Theranos story.

“I hate the word ‘wall’. We are anti-wall. We have a technology solution,” - Oh, the amount of self-unconsciousness there.

pony.ai

&gt; <i>In Eldada’s vision, lidar sensors could be deployed along the border, monitoring remote regions for movement, then determining whether there were people attempting unauthorized crossings [...] Eldada acknowledged that a contract for a virtual wall would be controversial, but he described it as a kind of protest against Trump’s version of border security. “I hate the word ‘wall’. We are anti-wall. We have a technology solution,” he said.</i><p>This physically nauseates me. Where are our ethics? Just because we <i>can</i> engineer something does not mean we <i>should.</i><p>It makes me glad that this company seems to be nothing but vaporware.