Valeo is a publicly traded car supplier based in France with sales of approximately $25 billion per year. Its consumers come from major automakers, traditionally from hardware subsystems for electrification, power assistance, lighting, and in-house solutions. sensors and electronic parts ranging from motors and lighting assemblies to ultrasonic sensors, cameras, radars, and LiDAR (light detection and ranging). The purpose is to continue to reshape and offer its products as the era of autonomy and software-defined cars (SDVs) take over. This was one of Valeo’s main demanding situations at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held recently in Las Vegas from January 7 to 11, 2025.
Overall auto sales are expected to fall as self-driving taxis reduce the need for private car ownership, and traditional revenues are expected to fall for OEM automakers like Valeo. It is imperative to add generation elements to your product offerings that enable a better visitor experience through hardware and software. Additionally, keeping up with a new generation of automakers like Tesla and BYD, who necessarily invented the SDV game, creates stress to constantly invent and update features for a new generation of consumers who expect what a car offers, advanced functionality and presents its useful life.
The company’s past evolution and its evolution over the past 30 years is shown in Figure 1.
The 1990s focused on convenience sensors (automatic parking) and in the 2000s, the protection factor was dominant (automatic emergency braking, lane departure warning subsystems). As degrees of automobile autonomy have improved, Valeo has maintained speed by providing LiDAR, camera and radar parts and subsystems for its OEM customers. Starting in 2018 with the SCALA 1 LiDAR, the products advanced in terms of functionality to the SCALA 2 edition in 2022, designed on the Mercedes S-Class (see Figure 2) for its L3 (Drive Pilot) diversity function. SCALA 2 achieves a diversity of 80 m for debris, brick and tire sized items and 300,000 pps in a ~600 cc volume with a square optical format. The original edition allowed Drive Pilot to achieve L3 capability up to a maximum speed of 60 km/h (38 mph). In 2024, it was upgraded to 95 km/h (60 mph) with the same equipment. Adaptations to the Valeo software made it possible to increase this speed by around 50%.
Valeo’s next-generation version, the SCALA 3, uses a similar platform as the SCALA 2, but delivers significantly higher range and resolution performance. It doubles the range and delivers 12.5 M pps in a ~1000 cm³ volume, with a 45 mm height and rectangular format suitable for roof or behind-the-grill mounting). The higher performance of the SCALA 3 is expected to double the speeds at which the L3 autonomy feature can perform. SCALA 3 is expected to start production by early 2025 and has been selected by Stellantis and three other global OEMs to support L3 and L4 autonomy features. The LiDAR order backlog is in the order of $1B currently (estimate about 2 M units).
The evolution of the LiDAR product is the best example of how Valeo is advancing in the era of autonomy and SDV: creating next-generation solutions, deploying them in the field, scaling volume manufacturing, improving their functionality through software updates and, at the same time, launching next-generation hardware to satisfy more complex desires and functions.
Clément Nouvel, who remains CTO of LiDAR at Valeo, has taken on other day-to-day tasks for Valeo’s autonomy strategy. I interviewed him at CES 2025. According to Nouvel, “Valeo considers that the progress of mobility is strongly related to the progress of society, but it is accompanied by frictions (parking, traffic jams) and safety problems. Valeo’s project is to maximise the benefits to society through the automation projects of our OEM and robotaxi consumers using well-designed technologies. “
In essence, the societal benefits are framed around four pillars:
As always, delivering solutions that maximize these benefits to large populations of car owners through affordable prices is critical.
The SDV is a vital detail in Valeo’s long-term product projects. It’s a delicate balancing act to meet the quick desires of OEMs at the right price, but with cars that are durable for long-term operation so they don’t want to be replaced over time. as desires for functionality increase. For example, building additional computing functionality from scratch will likely be too expensive and could become obsolete in the long run. The strategy then is to design the computing subsystems with modular designs so that additional computing and memory functions can be added with complex JIT (Just in Time) and seamless generation as functional features and software upgrades are implemented.
Valeo announced at CES 2025 a collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to simplify the SDV progression procedure and enable seamless collaboration with its OEM and robotaxi consumers. Valeo’s virtualized hardware lab, which will launch in the first quarter of 2025, reduces software progression pricing and time-to-market for its global consumers, who can verify new software on virtualized electronic assemblies (vECUs) and sensor models (VESMs) through the AWS cloud platform. For new hardware deployments, Valeo offers the Valeo Cloud Hardware Lab, which will allow consumers to access Valeo’s controlled large-scale HIL verification systems from an AWS-hosted workplace.
Valeo recognizes that autonomy, software and AI are disrupting the automotive market and changing the way its customers and their customers view personal transportation in the future. The goal is to make the car a platform with with periodic improvements in autonomy, infotainment and customer experience features, similar to a smart-phone model but with a safety focus, critical for cars moving at high speeds in cluttered environments.
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