Apple has held talks with at least four companies as possible suppliers for next-generation lidar sensors in self-driving cars, evaluating the companies' technology while also still working on its own lidar unit, three people familiar with the discussions said.
The sensor effort means Apple wants to develop the entire chain of hardware to guide autonomous vehicles and has joined automakers and investors in the race to find winning technologies. Apple's interest in next-generation lidar sensors comes as it has sharply increased its road testing while bringing on key hires from Tesla and Alphabet's Google.
In addition to evaluating potential outside suppliers, Apple is believed to have its own internal lidar sensor under development, two of the people said. The designs Apple is seeking could potentially be made with conventional semiconductor manufacturing techniques, all four people familiar with the talks said.
"They're not happy with most of what they see," the first person familiar with the matter said."They're looking for a revolutionary design."
AAPL should jump on this awesome news because later their iPhone sell numbers will disappoint, for this quarter and next one and next one and...because they no more can heat Samsung and Huawei and....
Proof that the real tech giants see Tesla's LIDAR-less self-driving systems as a huge failure that simply don't work reliably.
There are sensors to detect for the building of self driving cars?