The Times Magazine 23even maybe celebrated with the tech industry,”
he says, grinning. “But I’d like to think I’m on
the more mentally stable side of that spectrum.”
Although Luminar is based in Palo Alto,
California, the company’s research and
development base is in Orlando, on Florida’s
“Space Coast”, a strip of land rich in high-tech
engineering talent thanks to the proximity
of Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center.
Today, Russell is visiting the facility, where
a good portion of Luminar’s 400 employees
are based. Since floating on the stock market
in December, he says that everyone in the
company has been “super-energised”, which
is a nice way of saying “incredibly happy to
see the value of their shares shoot through
the roof”. A bit later, he half-concedes this.
“People didn’t join Luminar to squeeze
out a higher salary than maybe they were
making before with any of the other big tech
companies. But of course the equity paid out
well. So that’s the benefit of a good bet.”
The thing that sets Russell apart from
so many other tech entrepreneurs is that he
is not simply in the business of producing
software. Luminar actually makes things. The
sensors they produce use a technology called
lidar, which stands for light detection and
ranging (think “laser radar”). These sensors
emit pulses of light, invisible to the human
eye, and measure how long the light takes to
bounce back after hitting an object. Millions of
light pulses are emitted every second and the
resulting data is processed into something
called a point cloud, essentially a three-
dimensional map that shows a car the world
around it as it moves and changes in real time.
It can judge the distance and speed of
moving objects far better than our eyes
and brains can and, if you like, you can go
online and watch footage of what Luminar’s
systems “see” – a highly detailed, somewhat
phantasmagorical world of shapes, vehicles,
people, buildings, road markings and more, all
of which the lidar perceives at ranges of up to
500 metres in some systems. Lidar would be
used in conjunction with radar, inbuilt video
cameras and other sensors, but would be
the keystone technology of any autonomous
vehicle. Because if a self-driving car cannot
have a perfect understanding of the physical
world around it, says Russell, then how can
we ever hope to see roads, towns and cities
in which all vehicles are fully automated?
“The whole point is that it’s easy to make
an automated car that’s safe 99 per cent of
the time,” he says. Instead, the challenge
is whittling that final 1 per cent down to
the tiniest fraction possible: to ensure that
autonomous cars are, by any measure, far
safer than cars driven by humans. “There are
1.3 million lives lost on roads every year
[globally]. It’s crazy. Every single year,”
he says, frowning. “It’s pretty wild.”
But the problem – or at least, the problem
when Russell founded Luminar – is that lidar
units can be prohibitively expensive. Less
than ten years ago, a single sensor could cost
around £50,000. They also tended to be very
large and not the sort of thing you would
strap to a medium-sized family car. What
Russell has done over the past eight years
is develop from scratch Lidar sensors and
associated software that is relatively cheap- in some cases less than £1,000 per unit
- and small enough to be barely noticeable.
Today, Luminar has a deal with Volvo to supply
lidar units for its consumer vehicles from
2022, a partnership with Daimler Truck and
is working with many (as yet unnamed)
auto manufacturers on deals that would see
Luminar sensors incorporated into their cars.
What this all represents, says Russell, is an
opportunity to crack the global automotive
industry. Or rather, to achieve the tantalising
possibility that haunts the dreams of all young
tech CEOs: to disrupt. “You have a $3 trillion
a year consumer vehicle and trucking industry
that’s just totally ripe for disruption,” he says
with enthusiasm. His ambition is for Luminar’s
lidar technology to be incorporated as
standard into all vehicles. “Our mission
is to make autonomous vehicles safe and
ubiquitous,” he says. “And I don’t think we’re
going to stop until we see every car that’s
produced with a Luminar product in it.”
So you can see the potential. If the auto
industry concludes that lidar is the clearest
path to a self-driving future, then Russell’s
fortune could explode exponentially. But not
everyone is sold. The most consistent high-
profile critic is Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who
has called lidar technology “a fool’s errand”
and described any car manufacturer relying
on it as “doomed”.
The reason for this schism is highly
technical but at the heart of it is a belief,
on Musk’s part, that there are cheaper and
more effective ways of getting a self-driving
vehicle to see the world. His solution involves
using a combination of radar, sensors and- most importantly – digital video cameras.
Advanced software will then allow the car
to “understand” the live video images the
vehicle is collecting, in the same way that we
understand what we are seeing as we drive.
This so-called “computer vision” solution
means there is no need for a car to bounce
millions of laser beams off the world around it.
It will simply see. And understand.
Russell issues a short, booming laugh when
I mention Musk’s views on lidar. “Elon’s been
very vocal about it,” he says. And he admits
that if you just want a car to have an “assisted
driving” system – partial autonomy such as
Tesla’s autopilot feature, in which the driver
must be primed and ready to take over at any
moment – then yes, you can live without lidar.
“We’re talking about apples and oranges,”
he says of his and Musk’s respective
approaches. “But he’s saying his orange
is going to morph into an apple. That’s
the distinction.”
What he means is that Musk seems to
believe that his Tesla vehicles will be able to
make the jump from assisted driving to fully
autonomous driving without the need for lidar.
And perhaps in time that will be the case.
But Russell says that despite advances in AI
technology, reliably safe “computer vision” cars
are still the stuff of the future. Whereas lidar
is here now. Which is what car manufacturers
care about. “We’re working with 50 commercial
partners. And pretty much all of them
wholeheartedly disagree with Elon.”
The timetable for the fully self-driving
future is going to be gradual, says Russell,
despite the excited promises made by “various
autonomous vehicle companies”. Luminar
sensors are going to be incorporated as
standard into some cars from next year.
By 2025, he hopes lidar will be considered
a standard requirement for most high-end
vehicles and that autonomous driving will be
permitted on certain stretches of motorway.
By 2030, he hopes lidar will be standard for
all new vehicles. And by 2040 there should be
enough autonomous-capable cars on the roads
that the majority of drivers are really not
drivers at all, just passengers, “recovering their
time” and travelling in greater safety than ever.
That’s the plan, anyway. Russell stresses- and not the for the first time during
our conversation – just how difficult this
proposition is. But he thinks it’s possible, and
has done since he was a kid. Manually driven
cars will eventually become something akin
to the horses he sees on the ranches of rich
tech folk around Palo Alto: a relic of the past,
driven for pleasure rather than utility. Funnily
enough, he says, the one thing he really enjoys
when he’s feeling stressed or needs to clear
his head is a long drive. He admits he can
sometimes feel mildly self-conscious at the
“world’s youngest billionaire” tag, but nor is
it the worst thing in the world.
“I mean, listen, I’m excited to have
done all this stuff at a young age. I’m just
getting started though,” he says cheerfully,
without bravado. “I’ve got a lot ahead of me.
I’m looking forward to seeing what happens
when I’m 30.” n
‘Quirkiness is celebrated
in the tech industry. But
I think I’m on the mentally
stable side of the spectrum’