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I have definitely noticed a bias towards Continental in a lot of your posts. Do you really think they have a leg up on the industry?

• Animats 6y ago
  I liked the Advanced Scientific Concepts technology when I first saw it in 2003 or 2004 in Santa Barbara, when it was on an optical bench. No rotating machinery. A later version is used by Space-X to dock the Dragon spacecraft with the ISS. Their device was very expensive because it required custom ICs made using an unusual InGaAs process. But that's the kind of thing that becomes cheap when production gets into millions. Continental is an auto parts manufacturer, where every penny per part is carefully counted. If they thought they could get the cost down in volume, they probably could. But no market appeared. Continental appears to be able to make the things; they have demoed and offer a prototype. Setting up an assembly line to bang them out has to wait for a big order. Automatic driving isn't far enough along to generate such orders. Which is the big problem in all this. Nobody needs a million LIDARs yet.