December 16, 2025 - Luminar Files For Bankruptcy

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily for  December 16, 2025, and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, Vice President of Market Research for Telemetry.  

In the late 2010s, as the automated driving startup segment was booming, so too were related businesses like lidar. At one stage, there were upwards of 100 lidar startups vying to help enable automated vehicles, and one of the most promising of the lot was Luminar. However, just as most of the companies developing automated driving systems fell by the wayside, so too did most of the lidar startups. They either went bankrupt as they ran out of capital while developing their sensors and waiting for a market to materialize, or got acquired as the pioneer in the field, Velodyne, did when it was purchased by Ouster. 

Luminar first gained attention when Toyota announced it was using its sensors for its development, and later got supply contracts with Volvo and Mercedes-Benz. Unfortunately for Luminar, Volvo struggled to get the EX90 to production, and Luminar had issues delivering quality sensors. The two companies are currently in litigation after Volvo recently cancelled the contract, and the Mercedes-Benz deal quietly faded away. Luminar had hoped to crack the Chinese market, but that is now dominated by domestic vendors such as Hesai and Robosense and attempts to launch an insurance business based on the premise that vehicles equipped with Lidar would be safer and have fewer claims also never really got off the ground. 

Luminar has now filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and is working on selling off the remaining pieces of the company, including the lidar unit and the semiconductor subsidiary. Founder and former CEO Austin Russell recently made a bid to purchase the whole company and is apparently planning to bid during the bankruptcy process.  With the demise of Luminar, the number of lidar vendors still targeting the automotive sector is probably now close to the single digits, but the number of vehicles equipped with lidar is expected to grow significantly in the latter part of this decade as automakers start rolling out hands-off/eyes-off conditional automation systems at scale. 

Thanks for listening.