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09/11/2017: The key to sight for self-driving cars
Sep 11, 2017

09/11/2017: The key to sight for self-driving cars

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Hundreds of companies are racing to build self-driving cars, and one piece of technology is essential to all of their efforts. It's called LiDAR, an acronym that stands for light detection and ranging. It uses lasers to sense distances to an object and turn those distances into a 3-D representation of the environment. So it's how a self-driving car sees the world around it. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood visits Silicon Valley startup Luminar and its founder and CEO, 22-year-old Austin Russell. The company hopes to become the parts provider for automakers for LiDAR self-driving technology.

Segments From this episode

Self-driving carmakers haven't perfected a key piece of tech

Sep 11, 2017
Good isn't good enough when it comes to the lasers that allow autonomous vehicles to see.
A picture of Luminar's LIDAR monitor.
Molly Wood / Marketplace

Hundreds of companies are racing to build self-driving cars, and one piece of technology is essential to all of their efforts. It’s called LiDAR, an acronym that stands for light detection and ranging. It uses lasers to sense distances to an object and turn those distances into a 3-D representation of the environment. So it’s how a self-driving car sees the world around it. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood visits Silicon Valley startup Luminar and its founder and CEO, 22-year-old Austin Russell. The company hopes to become the parts provider for automakers for LiDAR self-driving technology.

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