Hesai Technology Unveils Latest AT1440 and FTX LiDAR Products

On April 21, just before the Shanghai Auto Show, Hesai Technology held its second annual Technology Release Open Day at its headquarters in Xuqian Road, Jiading District, Shanghai.

The global LiDAR enterprise Hesai Technology (NASDAQ: HSAI) launched its perception solution for L2 to L4 autonomous driving called “Qian Li Yan” (Thousand-Mile Eye), while officially releasing its new generation of automotive-grade LiDAR products: the ETX ultra-long-range LiDAR, AT1440 ultra-high-definition LiDAR, and FTX solid-state blind spot LiDAR.

Significant Cost Reduction Drives Market Growth

CEO and co-founder Li Yifan announced three major new clients. This growth is attributed to the booming Chinese intelligent vehicle market and doubling customer demand, with single LiDAR unit prices dropping from 200,000 yuan to just 200 USD.

Li stated that over eight years, LiDAR costs have decreased by 99.5%.

When national ministries explicitly prohibited exaggerating L2 assisted driving capabilities, this 11-year-old startup adopted the homophonic name “Qian Li Yan” (meaning “Thousand-Mile Eye”) for marketing. The name signifies its extremely long perception distance with centimeter-level accuracy, providing precise perception and safety for autonomous vehicles.

Comprehensive Solutions for Different Autonomous Driving Levels

The company offers three solutions: Qian Li Yan A, B, and C, providing different LiDAR combinations for L2 assisted driving, L3 conditional autonomous driving, and L4+ autonomous driving systems.

Qian Li Yan A: Ultra-HD Zero Blind Spots, Top Configuration for Autonomous Driving

This perception solution targets L4 autonomous driving systems, including four ultra-high-definition AT1440 units and four solid-state FTX units. The solution combines long and short-range capabilities with full-view coverage and no blind spots. Using the industry’s highest-line-count high-performance LiDAR for 360° coverage, it achieves centimeter-level small target detection capability, meeting the omnidirectional high-definition perception needs for high-speed applications like Robotaxi and Robotruck.

The AT1440 is the world’s highest line-count automotive-grade ultra-high-definition LiDAR with 1440 lines, equipped with Hesai’s fourth-generation self-developed chip, reaching a detection range of 300 meters at 10% reflectivity. It employs advanced high-efficiency photosensitive and ultra-high parallel processing technologies, increasing LiDAR line count by 10 times compared to similar products on the market, leading the LiDAR industry into the thousand-line ultra-high-definition era. This LiDAR’s point frequency exceeds 34 million points per second, more than 45 times that of current mainstream automotive LiDARs, enabling precise capture of small objects in complex urban streets and minor undulations and potholes on the road surface.

Four AT1440 units work collaboratively to scan and model the environment in all directions, helping autonomous driving systems accurately identify road boundaries, lane lines, and other key elements, providing the safety redundancy required for L4 autonomous driving. AT1440 will begin mass production in the second half of 2025, debuting on Carl Power’s first global future transportation robot and simultaneously deployed in Carl Power’s L4 autonomous driving truck fleet solution, helping Carl Power achieve large-scale commercial implementation of autonomous freight transportation.

The FTX is the global solid-state automotive-grade LiDAR with the widest field of view, featuring a maximum 180°×140° ultra-wide field of view, with resolution improved more than 2 times over the previous generation, while the exposed window area is reduced by 40%. As an excellent short-range ultra-wide-angle radar, FTX effectively covers blind spots around the vehicle, precisely detecting low obstacles such as road bollards and pets, helping accurately implement automatic parking functions. Additionally, it can monitor vehicles approaching rapidly from the side and rear in real-time, providing critical support for safe lane-change decisions.

Qian Li Yan B: Ultra-Long-Range Comprehensive Perception, Expanding L3 Safety Margins

This perception solution targets L3 conditional autonomous driving systems. It innovatively adopts a multi-LiDAR collaborative architecture with one forward-facing ultra-long-range ETX LiDAR + two short-range blind spot FTX LiDARs, achieving a perfect combination of ultra-long-range detection capability and 320° perception field of view coverage.

L3 conditional autonomous driving requires the system to handle driving tasks in specific scenarios while ensuring human drivers can take over at any time, thus setting core requirements for perception capabilities including ultra-long-range detection, precise small target identification, full-scenario coverage, and automotive-grade high reliability. “Qian Li Yan B” achieves all-around perception capabilities through a “forward high-performance main LiDAR + blind spot LiDAR” configuration, balancing long-range high precision and short-range real-time performance. Long-range detection capability is the most critical performance indicator for the forward-facing main LiDAR, directly determining the L3 level safety upper limit and scenario expansion potential.

In high-speed scenarios, this solution can identify risks such as construction zones and stationary vehicles in advance and accurately predict adjacent lane vehicle cut-in intentions. During lane changes, blind spot LiDARs can monitor approaching vehicles from the side and rear, reducing the risk of lateral collisions. In complex urban environments, the three LiDARs work collaboratively, sensitively detecting obstacles and avoiding risks in real-time, identifying more long-tail scenarios, and significantly improving driving safety.

The ETX is the world’s longest-range automotive-grade LiDAR, an ultra-long-distance product specifically designed for L3, which can be mounted behind the windshield inside the cabin. With a window height of only 32 mm, it achieves ultra-long-range detection of 400 meters (at 10% reflectivity). This stems from ETX’s equipped Hesai self-developed optical vector chip, which increases detection range by 30% while maintaining Class 1 eye safety, while significantly reducing the high-performance LiDAR’s size and power consumption. This technological breakthrough also gives it excellent small target recognition capability. ETX’s best angular resolution reaches 0.05°(H) x 0.05°(V), an 8-fold improvement over AT128, significantly expanding the safety margins of L3 autonomous driving. Meanwhile, the radar window height is reduced by 35%, making it more compact. ETX has already been nominated by top European OEMs for multi-year contracts, with batch deliveries starting at the end of 2026.

Qian Li Yan C: Essential Safety Component for L2 Combined Assisted Driving

This perception solution targets L2 level combined assisted driving systems, with the core sensor being one ATX compact long-range LiDAR. Thanks to its excellent long-range detection capability, LiDAR can detect potential dangers in advance, helping vehicles significantly improve AEB performance and active safety. At the same time, it is not affected by ambient light and can work stably even in backlight, low light, and glare conditions, providing reliable environmental data for assisted driving systems.

Hesai’s ATX LiDAR has become a bestselling L2 LiDAR product due to its outstanding performance. ATX features ultra-long-range detection of 200 meters at 10% reflectivity, high-definition deployment of up to 256 lines, and best angular resolution of 0.1°×0.1°, enabling precise perception of distant obstacles. ATX is equipped with Hesai’s self-developed waveform decoding engine IPE, which can filter out over 99.9% of environmental noise, ensuring stable perception in all weather conditions. Additionally, ATX’s extremely compact design and ultra-low power consumption allow it to be flexibly embedded in the vehicle body and behind the windshield, offering automotive manufacturers more installation options.

Currently, ATX has secured designated cooperation for dozens of models from 11 leading domestic car companies including BYD, Chery, Great Wall, and Changan, and will start large-scale mass production in the first quarter of 2025. As of mid-April 2025, it has already delivered over 50,000 units, becoming a standard safety component for many OEMs’ 2025 mass-production models.

Dual Strategy: Chip-Based and Platform-Based Approaches

Hesai was one of the earliest companies in the automotive LiDAR industry to propose a chip-based approach. The AT128 LiDAR, which began mass production in 2022, not only became the world’s first chip-based long-range LiDAR product to achieve automotive-grade mass production but also revolutionized the traditional discrete technology path with its chip-based integrated architecture for both transmitter and receiver. It reduced the volume to nearly half that of traditional solutions while increasing point cloud density to 1.53 million/second (twice that of similar products on the market), with key performance indicators comprehensively surpassing industry cognition.

By the end of 2024, AT128’s cumulative delivery volume exceeded 700,000 units, pushing the LiDAR industry officially into the new era of “chip-defined perception.”

Since achieving full-stack chip-based technology breakthrough in 2023, Hesai Technology has established a new technology benchmark in the LiDAR field. Its independently developed SPAD-SoC chip, as the world’s first automotive-grade pure solid-state integrated solution (ASIL D certified), integrates the transmitter VCSEL array, receiver 3D stacked SPAD array, and signal processing unit into single chips, achieving an extremely simplified chip architecture solution integrating sensing, storage, and computation.

In terms of performance, Hesai’s fourth-generation chip adopts a dual-core CPU, 8-core APU, internally integrating a 256-core waveform processing core, 1GHz main frequency, and the world’s first waveform decoding engine (IPE). This engine employs 24.6 billion samples per second ultra-frequency sampling technology, coupled with patented multi-echo separation algorithms, enabling nanosecond-level time-domain analysis of laser echo waveforms.

IPE can deeply decode the waveform of each beam of light, achieving intelligent filtering of over 99.9% environmental noise in typical interference scenarios such as rain, fog, dust, and vehicle exhaust. This enables LiDAR to achieve breakthrough all-weather intelligent parsing capabilities, significantly improving perception accuracy in complex environments, providing more reliable and efficient environmental perception support for intelligent vehicle autonomous driving systems.

The new generation of LiDAR developed based on this technology platform, through 4D perception algorithms and self-developed array detector collaborative optimization, can achieve ultra-long-range detection capability of up to 400 meters @ 10% reflectivity. Hesai’s fourth-generation chip platform will begin full-scale mass production within 2025.

Through its platform-based strategy, Hesai Technology has built a complete LiDAR product matrix covering automotive, robotics, industrial, and other fields, achieving full-stack technology reuse and scaled expansion. With the fourth-generation self-developed chip architecture as the platform core, through modular design, it has derived major product lines such as “Ultra-HD AT Series,” “Ultra-Long-Range ET Series,” “Pure Solid-State FT Series,” and “Mini JT Series,” forming a “chip-homologous, scenario-adaptive” technology ecosystem.

Hesai Technology, through its “chip-based + platform-based” dual-core driving strategy, has established an industry-leading rapid iteration system: based on the fourth-generation chip architecture, it achieves a core component reuse rate exceeding 85%, coupled with self-built fully automated production lines (100% core automation rate) forming a 2 million units/year capacity, driving new-generation product combinations to rapidly mass produce and enter the market.

By the end of 2025, Hesai’s annual production capacity is planned to reach 2 million units, with expected deliveries of 1.2-1.5 million units for the entire year, covering all-scenario needs from consumer-grade to automotive-grade, building LiDAR’s scale barrier in two trillion-yuan markets: automotive advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and intelligent robotics.

Dual-Line Growth, Leading the New Era of Autonomous Driving and Robotics

In 2024, Hesai Technology achieved significant growth in ADAS and robotics fields, becoming a global leader in the LiDAR industry with its technological advantages and international layout.

With its excellent technical capabilities, Hesai has won wide recognition from international automakers, becoming the only Chinese LiDAR company to pass Germany’s strict VDA audit. The company has signed a multi-year exclusive nomination agreement with a top European OEM. Among the world’s top 10 international automobile manufacturers with the highest revenues on the Fortune Global 500 list, 6 (or their joint venture partners) have established mass production nomination relationships with Hesai. This achievement highlights Hesai’s leading position in the global ADAS LiDAR market, earning it the honor of being ranked first in global automotive LiDAR market share, global ADAS LiDAR market share, and global L4 autonomous driving LiDAR market share for four consecutive years.

At the same time, Hesai is flourishing in multiple robotics sectors with its Pandar, QT, OT, XT, and JT series LiDAR products, extensively covering various high-growth markets including mobile robots, delivery robots, cleaning robots, and lawn-mowing robots. The company actively expands its cooperation ecosystem, establishing close partnerships with leading robotics companies such as Roborock lawn-mowing robots, Jiushi Autonomous Vehicles, QunHe Technology, Weita Power, and Yushu Robotics. Through collaborative efforts with over 1,700 global partners, Hesai is fully promoting the rapid development of the robotics industry, accelerating toward the trillion-yuan robotics era.

On the same day, Hesai Technology and spatial intelligence enterprise QunHe Technology announced a strategic partnership to jointly launch a new robot simulation training scenario generation solution. Through deep integration of Hesai LiDAR with QunHe Technology’s spatial understanding model SpatialLM and spatial intelligence solution SpatialVerse, they will achieve millimeter-level 3D spatial modeling and intelligent annotation of physical properties, creating a high-fidelity spatial rapid training solution for robots. This collaboration will significantly lower the threshold for simulation training in the robotics industry, accelerating the commercial implementation of intelligent robots.

In the field of robot environment perception, LiDAR has become a core sensor for complex scenario modeling due to its active ranging, high precision, and strong anti-interference characteristics. Hesai’s XT and JT series LiDARs can quickly generate dense point cloud data, effectively solving the accuracy degradation problems of pure vision solutions in low light and dynamic scenes. Compared to traditional vision solutions that depend on lighting conditions and have high computational complexity, LiDAR can stably output millimeter-level spatial structure data, providing reliable basic data input for QunHe’s spatial large model.

QunHe Technology is a spatial intelligence enterprise based on artificial intelligence (AI) technology and dedicated graphics processing unit (GPU) clusters. During years of technological accumulation, it has built a physically correct world simulator and applied it to real-time rendering in indoor spatial scenes, industrial production and manufacturing, and virtual physical world training scenarios. Its spatial intelligence solution SpatialVerse enhances the cognitive abilities of embodied intelligence, AIGC, and AR/VR systems by mimicking the physical characteristics and spatial relationships of the real world. It has already established cooperation with a batch of domestic and foreign embodied intelligence enterprises, including leading Silicon Valley technology companies.

Meanwhile, Hesai Technology and autonomous truck technology company Carl Power announced a deepening of their strategic cooperation. Hesai’s globally highest line-count automotive-grade mass-production LiDAR AT1440 debuted on Carl Power’s first global future transportation robot and is simultaneously deployed in mass-produced Carl Power L4 autonomous driving truck platoon solutions, helping Carl Power achieve large-scale commercial implementation of autonomous freight transportation. This cooperation marks a key step in the companies’ joint efforts to promote the commercial implementation of advanced autonomous driving.

As the global automotive-grade LiDAR with the highest line count, AT1440 is equipped with Hesai’s fourth-generation self-developed chip, adopting more advanced high-efficiency photosensitive and ultra-high parallel processing technologies to achieve ultra-long-range detection capability of 300 meters (at 10% reflectivity). Its angular resolution reaches 0.05°×0.0125°, outputting image-level point clouds with density more than 40 times that of current mainstream automotive LiDARs, precisely identifying small obstacles in complex urban scenarios. With 360° full-scenario coverage and zero blind spot advantages, AT1440 will become the core perceptual hardware for Carl Power to achieve fully unmanned freight transportation operations.

Carl Power is a leading enterprise in China’s L4 autonomous driving freight sector, pioneering a hybrid intelligent platoon model (human driver in lead vehicle, unmanned following vehicles) suitable for large-scale commercial applications in bulk logistics. It conducts L4 autonomous driving hybrid intelligent platoon testing and normalized operations in regions represented by Ordos City in North and Northwest China. It is the first company approved to conduct cross-city autonomous driving heavy truck platoon testing in Northwest China and the first approved to conduct autonomous driving public road testing in four North and Northwest China locations (Beijing, Inner Mongolia, Tianjin, and Hebei), successfully opening the bulk freight Northwest Corridor. In the autonomous driving freight market that can create trillion-yuan value, Carl Power has entered a positive cycle of both business closed-loop and technology closed-loop. With excellent technical strength and commercial deployment, Carl Power owns the largest autonomous driving transport fleet, breaking through 18 million kilometers in L4 autonomous driving platoon demonstration operations, with accumulated transportation volume of 140 million ton-kilometers of bulk commodities, leading the entire industry in unmanned and commercial progress of freight autonomous driving.

Hesai Technology also officially signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Keting Technology, a high-end intelligent garden brand in the Roborock ecosystem, at Hesai’s Shanghai Maxwell Smart Manufacturing Center. This cooperation marks that the two parties will conduct in-depth cooperation in the field of intelligent garden robots, jointly promoting technological upgrades and product innovation. Within the next year, Hesai Technology will provide Keting Technology with 300,000 JT series LiDARs, empowering Roborock lawn-mowing robots, significantly improving their performance and user experience, and further enhancing product competitiveness in the market. This cooperation not only demonstrates both parties’ strong innovation capabilities in the smart home field but also highlights their strategic layout and synergistic advantages in the intelligent garden robot track.

As an advanced sensor technology, LiDAR brings revolutionary intelligent upgrades to lawn-mowing robots. Through high-precision environmental perception capabilities, LiDAR can scan garden terrain in real-time, precisely identifying obstacles, boundaries, and vegetation distribution, thereby achieving efficient and precise lawn-mowing path planning. It not only improves mowing efficiency, avoiding the repeated operations and missed areas of traditional lawn mowers, but also significantly enhances the safety and reliability of lawn mowers in complex environments. Hesai Technology, with its technological advantages in the LiDAR field, provides core technical support for Roborock lawn-mowing robots, helping them achieve technological breakthroughs and product upgrades in the intelligent garden robot field.

Keting Technology focuses on the research and development, production, manufacturing, and sales of garden intelligent products. Its product line covers lawn-mowing robots, garden electric tools, and other intelligent devices. Based on existing technological advantages and market experience, Keting Technology will gradually deepen its smart agriculture strategy and further expand market application scenarios. With excellent product performance and reliable quality assurance, Keting Technology has achieved significant success in international markets. Currently, it has established a continuously growing sales network in mainstream European and North American markets and entered multiple regional markets including Northeast Europe and Southwest Europe. As the company’s brand influence and market share steadily increase, Keting Technology has become a well-known manufacturer in the international garden intelligence market.