According to Caixin Media on March 19 (Editor Zhao Hao), on Tuesday (March 18), in early trading, USA Lidar technology company $Luminar Technologies (LAZR.US)$ continued yesterday's upward trend, at one point rising nearly 15% to $7.37, and now the increase has narrowed to around 11%, currently at $7.17.

On Monday, Luminar closed up 27.13%, marking the largest single-day increase in over two months, and its stock price has turned from decline to rise this year. Meanwhile, the stock price of electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla continued to fall nearly 5% in early trading following a 4.79% drop yesterday, with a year-to-date decline of over 40%.

In the news, former NASA engineer Mark Rober uploaded a video on YouTube three days ago, where he test-drove a car equipped with Luminar Lidar technology, claiming its performance surpassed Tesla's autonomous driving functionalities.

It is understood that Rober has previously worked at NASA and Apple. He spent seven of his nine years at NASA dedicated to the development of the Mars rover "Curiosity", which landed on Mars in August 2012 and subsequently discovered sediment rich in mineral salts in Gale Crater.

In 2018, reports indicated that Rober had been secretly developing Virtual Reality projects for Apple. The two patent applications submitted by Apple that year bore Rober's name, describing virtual reality systems for both autonomous vehicle passengers and traditional vehicle passengers.

In 2022, Rober founded an educational technology company called "CrunchLabs", which has 65.5 million subscribers on its video platform account. The video comparing Luminar Lidar and Tesla cameras has garnered 13.43 million views.

In the first half of the video, Rober secretly carried Lidar equipment and scanned.$Disney (DIS.US)$The indoor roller coaster 'Space Mountain' in the park, and based on the obtained data, created a 3D model to restore the entire appearance of the roller coaster project. Rober stated that many applications of Lidar exceed imagination.

In the second half of the video, Rober designed six test projects to pit Luminar's Lidar against Tesla's cameras in a direct confrontation. The results showed that Tesla's cameras could not identify obstacles in smoke and water curtains, nor could they recognize false wall obstacles.

After the video was released, Luminar's X and LinkedIn accounts both shared it. Rober emphasized in the video description that although Luminar provided the vehicle for testing, he did not receive any financial compensation from the company, and this video was not a paid promotion.

Last week, Caixin reported that current autonomous driving is nearing the transition to L3. Cameras and millimeter-wave radar are sufficient to meet the perception layer configuration requirements for L2 and below, but when transitioning to L3 level autonomous driving, the necessity of installing Lidar becomes apparent.

Waymo's co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov once stated that Lidar is the "optical safety belt" for L4 level autonomous driving, and its centimeter-level accuracy and multi-dimensional data streams are foundational guarantees that cannot be replaced by purely visual solutions.

Editor/Rocky