FAW Jiefang, Livox, Zhito to Push Autonomous Heavy Truck Into Smart Driving Era

Date:2020-10-23 Source:prnewswire

Livox Tech, a world-leading lidar manufacturer, announced its collaboration with FAW Jiefang Automotive Co., Ltd. ("FAW Jiefang") and Suzhou Zhito Technology Co., Ltd. ("Zhito Technology"). FAW Jiefang is an OEM manufacturer with the highest sales globally for heavy-duty trucks, while Zhito Technology is a vehicle intelligence research and development company launched by FAW Jiefang. As one of the world's top manufacturers of commercial vehicles, FAW Jiefang has been the leader in heavy-duty trucks sales in China for four consecutive years and the industry's top performer in the sales of tractors for 14 consecutive years, and sales for a single brand globally for two years in a row.

Recently, FAW Jiefang and Zhito Technology unveiled the J7 L3 super-truck, a joint development by the two companies. Partnering with Livox to add automotive-grade lidars, the J7 L3 model is the first mass production heavy-duty truck to use lidar. This historic partnership pushes truck manufacturing and logistics into the era of smart driving with the latest hardware and software.

Livox boasts a unique solid-state rotating-polygon technology and is supported by DJI's established supply chain management and manufacturing capabilities as well as quality control system. Through years of experience, Livox has managed to overcome bottlenecks such as cost, reliability, and production scalability that have restricted the large-scale application of lidar in the past. Livox products meet the requirements for automotive-grade lidars in autonomous driving, and are highly regarded by the research and development, quality, and commercial teams of Zhito Technology.

Lidar is an indispensable core sensor in high-level autonomous systems because of the advantages it offers such as superior range perception and low-light environment adaptability. Statistics show that heavy-duty commercial trucks typically run on highways continuously for over 17 hours a day. Such year-round, high-intensity use meant that FAW Jiefang's requirements for Livox lidars were much higher than for passenger vehicles. These strict requirements include higher reliability, stability, and vibration resistance along with a 10-year design life cycle and 1.5 million miles.

Through fast and efficient communication with customers as well as its sophisticated smart manufacturing and supply chain system management, Livox was able to successfully achieve these stringent product requirements. This collaboration is a new industry milestone for the large-scale mass production of lidars since the collaboration with Gaussian Robotics in July this year for a mass production at the 10,000-unit scale.

Livox's unique patented hermetic packaging technology DL-PACK ensures the high reliability of core emission and reception components while simplifying the focusing process on the production lines. One-time automatic focusing is applied on each Livox product, rendering the manufacturing process dozens of times more efficient than with traditional mechanical lidars. These enable mass production at a large scale while reducing the assembling cost dramatically.

Besides ensuring mass production deliverability, automotive-grade components are also used for all the core parts of Livox Horizon. They meet the AEC-Q and other relevant standards, and have passed reliability standard tests such as ISO16750 and IEC60068 and fulfilled the EMC test standards of ISO11452, ISO7637 and CISPR25. These ensure the service life of the products and various test standards and results meet the automotive-grade requirements.

Backed by DJI's automotive-grade smart manufacturing center, the Livox production lines are installed with state-of-the-art test equipment and automotive-grade laboratories certified by the state. Furthermore, the planned annual mass production capacity for a single production line has been set at 100,000 units, with four to five production lines to be rolled out eventually at the manufacturing center to meet the annual production requirement of 500,000 lidars. Livox has achieved a major breakthrough in its research and development of automotive-grade lidars, and has the capacity to tackle automotive-grade mass production projects with ease. This ensures the reliability and timely delivery of the smart vehicle products for the FAW Jiefang J7 L3 project.

With competitive advantages such as high product performance, automotive-grade reliability, and mass production guarantee, Livox looks forward to collaborating with more partners in the future to provide better perception solutions and make smart driving a reality as soon as possible.