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Cars that drive themselves are a possibility, but they won’t be coming overnight.

Still, there’s plenty of reason to think autonomous technology will be part of technological advances in the near future, said Vincent Racine, Senior Product Line Manager for LeddarTech, especially with many municipal and regional governments beginning to loosen regulations on testing some of those technologies in real-world scenarios.

“The active market segments are areas where there’s less regulation, where you can do trials – for example, if you talk about autonomous trucking applications, there are roads in the United States where it’s allowed to do autonomous driving testing,” Racine said. “These are areas that will be more active on the short-term horizon. If we go longer, then we talk about the passenger car, but that’s still further down the road.”

No matter the timetable, utilizing sensors will be a key technology for the future, and companies are looking for rugged sensors that will work. LeddarTech’s solid-state LiDAR sensors fit the bill, outperforming many competitors in the same space in how long it takes for a sensor to fail.

“Ruggedness is key,” Racine said. “For a system integrator or a vehicle manufacturer, obviously the goal is to have a sensor that will last as long as the vehicle itself. This is exactly what we’re targeting with our sensor. If you look at the marketplace and other technologies available, our solid-state approach will be 10 to 15 times more durable than other solutions on the market today.”