I tried to figure it out and it is not clear what exactly can be used as a chea automotive lidar that can replace a 75K rooftop velodyne. And experts couldn’t give the answer, so the question is complicated. However, cheap lidars (e.g., even $100 automotive grade) falls quite short in terms of their capabilities. So it is not an apple-to-apple comparison by far.
However, the price tag is still not available yet, so I assume they failed to make a cheap LIDAR and the exact progress is hard to estimate: https://waymo.com/lidar
I tried to figure it out and it is not clear what exactly can be used as a chea automotive lidar that can replace a 75K rooftop velodyne. And experts couldn’t give the answer, so the question is complicated. However, cheap lidars (e.g., even $100 automotive grade) falls quite short in terms of their capabilities. So it is not an apple-to-apple comparison by far.
In fact, Google’s Waymo promised a much cheaper automotive rooftop lidar, indeed. It was supposed to be about only 7.5K: https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/06/waymo-to-start-selling-standalone-lidar-sensors/?guccounter=1
However, the price tag is still not available yet, so I assume they failed to make a cheap LIDAR and the exact progress is hard to estimate: https://waymo.com/lidar