(Reuters) – Aeva Inc at the start-up of Silicon Valley and Japanese car supplier Denso Corp said on Tuesday that the two will work together to bring a key sensor for self-driving cars to the “supermarket.”
Aeva, founded by two former Apple Inc engineers, makes a lidar sensor that helps cars get a three-dimensional view of the road and can also detect how fast things are far from moving. Founded in 2017, Aeva is in the process of publicly trading through a backward merger with the white check company InterPrivate Acquisition Corp in a $ 563 million contract.
The Aeva sensor operates on a principle called frequency modular continuous wave, or FMCW, which is different from competitors such as Velodyne Lidar and Luminar Technologies.
In a statement, Kazuma Natsume, director of autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems engineering for division two of Denso, said the company plans to collaborate with Aeva “to further develop the FMCW lidar, to the mass market and create a society free from traffic accidents. ”
Denso is the second largest car supplier in the world, working closely with car manufacturers such as Toyota Motor Corp., which owns nearly a quarter of the company. In addition to saying both are aimed at a large market, Aeva and Denso did not reveal further details about the collaboration, such as what the final cost of Aeva technology would be for manufacturers.
Aeva last year announced a contract with German car industry provider ZF Friedrichshafen AG to put its lidar sensors into production, and in 2019 it took an investment from Porsche Automobil Holding SE, the largest shareholder voted Vkswagen AG .
“Achieving high-performance board stakes” for lidar sensors, Soroush Salehian, Aeva chief executive, told Reuters in an interview. “Achieving high achievement at an affordable cost is the sacred splendor. ”
Reporting with Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Edited by Steve Orlofsky