Company: LIDRW
Filing Date: 2025-02-24
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001437749-25-004906
Chunk: 3

Company: AEye, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-24
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 3
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, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, adopted a new rule which mandates that passenger vehicles have automatic emergency braking, or AEB, and pedestrian AEB, and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration introduced proposed rulemaking to mandate AEB in heavy trucks. These rules may require additional hardware and software to meet these requirements. With that in mind, passenger and commercial vehicle OEMs are expected to introduce lidar sensors to enhance ADAS features and improve safety for passengers and pedestrians. Applications for the Automotive end market include lidar sensors and software for passenger and commercial vehicles. For vehicles to achieve greater autonomous functionality and perform those functions at higher speeds, we believe long-range lidar will be necessary. Our sensors were designed to search, detect, acquire, and track small objects at long distances. In the future, we may also introduce other mid- and short-range lidar systems based on the same 4SightTM Intelligent Sensing Platform. Our system is particularly well-suited to reduce the intensive compute (and associated power and latency) requirements of autonomous systems because our platform handles critical data processing at the sensor level, thereby allowing the self-driving system to focus limited compute resources on the vehicle's path planning. We believe that our strategy to partner with Tier 1 automotive suppliers to produce high-quality, long-range lidar at scale will help drive adoption of lidar into series production across major global OEMs.

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      Passenger vehicle ADAS — highway autonomy in passenger vehicles is a highly relevant use case for our technology, as passenger vehicle OEMs are actively in the process of adding new features that enhance the consumer driving experience. These highway systems rely on consistent detection of dangerous, often small, obstacles at long distances and high speeds, which our system can optimize for in software. 

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      Commercial vehicle ADAS — hub-to-hub autonomy in commercial vehicles, such as short- and long-range delivery vehicles, enabled by lidar, promises similar technological utility to that in passenger vehicles. Importantly, however, the value that a commercial vehicle operator derives from commercial ADAS is driven by increased utility and safety through reduced risk from driver fatigue. We believe that adoption rates for long-range lidar will be higher in commercial vehicles initially due to the significant share of time that highway driving represents for commercial customers. 

Non-Automotive

In 2023, we decided to wind down our legacy Non-Automotive product line and we dialed back support for this end market. Since the launch of