PARIS, June 15 — The Stellantis group has announced that it has chosen to equip several models across its various auto brands with Valeo’s third-generation LiDAR from 2024.

This will enable these vehicles to be certified for level 3 autonomous driving, which means that the driver will be able to take their hands off the steering wheel and their eyes off the road in complete safety.

Thanks to the latest generation of Valeo’s LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) system, Stellantis will be able to offer its customers a more enjoyable driving experience.

Level 3 self-driving capabilities can be achieved thanks to the ability of Valeo’s LiDAR to detect absolutely all objects and road users, including motorists, motorcyclists, cyclists and pedestrians, day and night.

For example, it can identify an abandoned object, such as a tire, at a distance of more than 150 meters on the black asphalt of an unlit road, which no human eye or camera could detect.

Ultimately, this unprecedented power of perception allows the system to “see” what is otherwise invisible to the human eye, not to mention cameras and more traditional radar systems.

Thanks to all this, the car can advance in a fully automated way in certain situations.

This LiDAR system can even measure the density of raindrops and calculate the right braking distance accordingly.

Thanks to its algorithms, it also anticipates the trajectories of vehicles driving ahead and immediately triggers the necessary safety manoeuvres.

This new LiDAR shows a significant increase in performance in terms of range compared to previous generations, as well as in resolution and the number of images analysed per second.

It reconstructs what is happening all around the car, in three dimensions and in real time, at a rate of 4.5 million pixels and 25 frames per second.

It reconstructs a 3D image of the vehicle’s surroundings using a point cloud, with an as yet unparalleled resolution. It can map the topology of the road and detect road markings.

For all car manufacturers, achieving Level 3 self-driving capabilities is now a priority. Recently, Mercedes announced that an update of its Drive Pilot automated driving system, on its S-Class and EQS models, would allow drivers to benefit from this level of autonomous driving — in Germany only, at first, under certain conditions and in heavy traffic or congestion. — ETX Studio