Aeva Technologies Signs Deal With Nikon For Sensor Production

Aeva Technologies will produce sensors for the Nikon industrial engine (photo: twitter @aebarc)

Aeva Technologies announced on Monday 6 November that it has signed an agreement to produce sensors for the Nikon industrial engine that can scan objects such as cars leaving the assembly line for microscopic defects.

Based on Mountain View, California, Aeva is developing what is known as a lidar sensor, which is often found in cars with driver-assisted features to help vehicles gain a three-dimensional view of the road.

While Aeva is targeting the automotive market, their sensors can also be used in other applications that require three-dimensional scanning. In 2021 the company announced that it is working with Nikon to improve the industrial equipment of Japanese companies.

Nikon makes a scanning machine that can check cars and other objects for small defects to improve manufacturing quality. But the engine is too large, slow, and expensive to use on each vehicle on the manufacturing line. The Aeva sensor aims to make the machine smaller and cheaper so that more vehicles can be checked.

"For the most stringent automaker, the main goal is 100%," said Soroush Saleian, chief executive of Aeva, in an interview with Reuters. He said that the current percentage of vehicles scanned varies depending on the demands of the quality of car manufacturers. "What we believe we can do with time is increase the percentage of production that can be handled by scanners," said Aeva.

Aeva hopes to start supplying sensors to Nikon next year, where Nikon products equipped with Aeva sensors will begin circulating on the market in 2025.

Saleian declined to reveal how many sensors Aeva would send or how much the company expects from the deal with Nikon. He said that the shipping volume would be smaller than the automotive market, but each sensor had a cost of about 10 times higher than automotive sensors due to higher precision.