ADAS & Autonomous Vehicle Engineering - January 2023 - 17

People/Ideas
ride-hailing fleets of Lyft and Uber, in partnership with
AV tech startup Motional, starting in 2023.
Functionality advances
Meanwhile, ADAS technology continues to expand
beyond the formal SAE Level 2 category. The enhanced
(and unofficial) " Level 2-Plus " - the term was coined by
supplier giant ZF - is the industry's hottest automated
driving playing field, engineers tell SAE Media. While
SAE Level 3 remains controversial, Honda recently said
it is developing technology to enable its L3 system to
function at any speed below legal limits on highways
by the second half of the 2020s.
Honda in March 2021 became the first OEM
to sell a vehicle with L3 capabilities, but only in its
Japan home market. Likewise Audi, which did not
homologate its L3 system, is forging ahead with
enhanced ADAS.
The shift of AV development focus into commercial
vehicles, and the parallel rise of super-enhanced ADAS,
has " the market for radar, camera, lidar, and computing
accelerating very fast, " reported Pierrick Bouley, senior
analyst at Yole Intelligence. In September 2022, he placed
the market's compounded annual growth rate (CAGR)
at 13.2%. " We see this market growing from $15.4 billion
in 2022 to $28.6 billion in 2027, " Bouley noted. A recent
report by Fortune Business Insights pegged the global
lidar market value to reach $6.71B by 2026, compared
with $1.32B in 2018. Through the 2019-2026 forecast
period, Fortune expects automotive lidar's CAGR to
reach 22.7%.
SAE Media asked Jeremy Carlson, the Los
Angeles-based associate director at industry analysts
S&P Global who specializes in AV and ADAS technologies,
for his view as Level 2-Plus and L3 systems development
rushes ahead and AVs move to a commercial-vehicle
play.
" The shift is not necessarily at the expense of autonomous
Levels 4 and 5, " he said. " Early on, the messaging
from automakers indicated a fear of missing out on lightduty
AVs - an " are the tech companies going to eat our
lunch?' kind of mentality. They wanted to explore Level
4, but it's a pretty big upending of the business model to
get into this mobility-as-a-service, fleet-centric model. "
The industry's concerns about such a profound
Waymo's latest roboshuttle will see expanded operations in 2023,
the company promises.
change weren't based only on the cost and development
time of the technology, but also the relationship
with the customer.
" All of that has context in bringing in automated
driving at Levels 2, L2-Plus and L3. It represents an
advancement of functionality. It's also quite accessible
to a lot of customers in terms of cost, and accessible
to the automaker and suppliers in terms of investment
and fewer redundancies required. "
The further up the SAE Levels scale OEMs take
their systems, the greater the technology and cost challenge.
Carlson noted that many of the L2-Plus capabilities
essentially are convenience features: " Customers
are mostly happy to pay for them because they deliver
tangible benefits. "
While some sensor and hardware content, such
as forward-looking cameras, radars, and some blindspot
radars, are approaching heavy penetration rates,
suppliers continue to realize rising profits as the value
per sensor increases, Carlson said.
And regarding the AV " stack, " the growth of
autonomy domain controllers is ongoing in Level 2 and
L2-Plus, as engineers integrate ever-expanding sensor
arrays. The domain-control architectures enable features
such as vehicle path planning.
" They're making this area more vertically integrated.
There is significant innovation in all these
areas, " he asserted. ■
ADAS & AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE ENGINEERING
January 2023 17
Waymo
ADAS & Autonomous Vehicle Engineering - January 2023

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