China's leading lidar company Hesai announced that it has developed a new generation of vehicle-mounted lidar sensor that can recognize colors, which is expected to significantly improve the environmental perception accuracy and driving safety of autonomous driving systems. Hesai said that this technological breakthrough is in line with this year's trend of China's automobile industry shifting from "price war" to "value-driven innovation", emphasizing that in the field of autonomous driving, greater value should be created through technological upgrading rather than simply lowering prices.
CEO Li Yifan told the media in Shanghai that if the entire industry only focuses on price, resources will be over-invested in cost reduction, but will sacrifice the opportunity to explore better solutions and create higher value.
According to reports, the EXT series lidar released by Hesai is supported by its self-developed "Picasso" chip with computing power. It is the first product in the industry to integrate both spatial detection and color detection capabilities in a single device.
The company's co-founder Sun Kai said at the press conference that the new product is planned to be mass-produced later this year and is expected to be the first to be installed on a number of flagship models around 2027.
According to statistics from the Gasgoo Automotive Research Institute, an industry organization, Hesai's share of the automotive lidar market will exceed 40% in 2025, and its customers include Li Auto, Xiaomi, BYD and other major Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers.
In overseas markets, Hesai is also one of the core lidar suppliers of Nvidia's advanced driver assistance systems, and related systems will be adopted by international car companies such as Mercedes-Benz in the future.
However, data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers shows that as of 2025, only about 3% of vehicles globally will be equipped with lidar, indicating that this technology is still in the penetration rate climbing stage.
Not all car companies agree on the necessity of lidar. For example, Tesla insists on using a "pure vision" solution, while Xpeng Motors announced last year that it would remove lidar from new models and instead rely more on artificial intelligence-driven perception and decision-making technology.
Sun Kai believes that lidar still has huge room for growth. Lidar uses light to determine the spatial position of objects and "see" everything in the environment. The addition of color information means that the sensor can not only identify the shape and distance of objects, but also distinguish key signals such as red and green lights, thereby further improving the safety redundancy of the autonomous driving system in complex road scenes.
In addition to the automotive business, Hesai is also expanding into a broader market for "Physical AI".
The company simultaneously launched a handheld device "Kosmo" that looks like a red wine bottle, which is used to collect three-dimensional data of the real world in order to build a "digital twin" of the physical space.
Xiang Shaoqing, chief technology officer of Hesai, said that this device hopes to provide a more sophisticated environmental understanding capability for the new generation of physical intelligence systems, including humanoid robots, to support their navigation, operation and interaction in the real world.
Hesai has not announced the specific commercial timetable of Kosmo.
The company chose to release a new generation of lidar products on the eve of the Beijing International Auto Show. The auto show is regarded as one of the largest auto shows in the world. It is expected that more than a hundred brands will display the latest intelligent electrification and autonomous driving technologies on site to compete for technology and voice in a new round of competition.