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> Ouster’s engineers have paid to ensure every sensor stands up to the wear and tear

IOW, no one is sure if it actually will

We do a tremendous amount of testing to ensure real-world reliability, and our customers' results bear that out. Full functional safety certification is slated for end of this year, which means it's already well underway.

We make a point of this because legacy spinning lidar is unreliable. But it's unreliable because of the analog design, not because spinning is inherently unreliable.

This seems dubious to be honest. Moving parts break, simply due to mechanical wear at the very least. Gyroscopic forces for example from the spinning motion is less than ideal for drones.

I realize a solid state lidar may be a very challenging prospect but it would be a huge selling point!

If the device is reliable then you should quote a FIT number. A very good VCSEL based transceiver in an indoor environment has a FIT of about 100 at Tj~65C and a CI of 60%. If we assume your FIT rate is similar (it won’t be because your operating conditions are more difficult) and have 128 of these devices your FIT rate ~12800 (assuming independent failures). This puts your MTBF at around 8.9years.

Some transceivers have a FIT rate of ~300FIT so if that’s the case your rel will only be 3 years.

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