Valeo Moves Beyond Hardware to Serve the New Era of Software Defined and Autonomous Vehicles
Valeo is a publicly listed automotive supplier, headquartered in France with revenues of ~$25B/year. It counts major automotive OEMs as its customers, traditionally for hardware subsystems for electrification, driving assistance, lighting and inside cabin solutions. Products include mechanical, electrical, sensing and electronic components spanning from motors and lighting assemblies to ultrasonic, camera, radar and LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensors. The goal is to continue transforming and upgrading its product offerings as the era of autonomy and software defined vehicles (SDV) takes over. This was a major focus for Valeo at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) held recently in Las Vegas from January 7-11, 2025.
Overall car sales are expected to drop as autonomous taxis reduce the need for personal ownership of cars, with a decrease in traditional revenues for automotive suppliers like Valeo. Adding technology components to their product offerings that enable upgraded customer experience through hardware and software is critical. Additionally, keeping pace with a new generation of automotive OEMs like Tesla and BYD which essentially invented the SDV game creates pressure to constantly invent and upgrade features for a new generation of consumers who expect a car to deliver improved performance and features over its lifetime.
The historical evolution of the company and its products over the past 30 years is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Valeo’s Automation and Product Journey
The 1990s emphasized convenience sensors (self parking) and in the 2000s, the issue of safety was dominant (Automatic Emergency Braking, Lane Departure Warning sub-systems). As levels of autonomy in cars have progressed, Valeo has kept pace by offering LiDAR, camera and radar components and sub-systems to its OEM customer base. Starting in 2018 with the SCALA 1 LiDAR, the products progressed in terms of performance to the SCALA 2 version in 2022, which is designed into the Mercedes S-Class (see Figure 2) to support its L3 autonomy feature (Drive Pilot). SCALA 2 achieves a 80 m range for brick and tire debris size objects and 300,000 pps in a ~ 600 cm³ volume with a square optical format. The original version enabled Drive Pilot to achieve L3 capability up to a maximum speed of 60 km/h (38 m/h). In September 2024, this was upgraded to 95 Km/h (60 m/h) with identical hardware. Software adaptations by Valeo enabled this ~50% speed increase.
Figure 2: 05 May 2022, Berlin: Mercedes is the first manufacturer in Germany to start selling a … (+)
Valeo’s next-generation version, the SCALA 3, uses a similar platform as the SCALA 2, but delivers significantly higher range and resolution performance. It doubles the range and delivers 12.5 M pps in a ~1000 cm³ volume, with a 45 mm height and rectangular format suitable for roof or behind-the-grill mounting). The higher performance of the SCALA 3 is expected to double the speeds at which the L3 autonomy feature can perform. SCALA 3 is expected to start production by early 2025 and has been selected by Stellantis and three other global OEMs to support L3 and L4 autonomy features. The LiDAR order backlog is in the order of $1B currently (estimate about 2 M units).
The LiDAR product evolution is a perfect example of how Valeo approaches the era of autonomy and SDVs – build cutting edge technology solutions, deploy them in the field, scale volume manufacturing, improve their performance through software upgrades, and in parallel, launch the next generation of hardware to support more advanced needs and features.
Clement Nouvel who continues as the CTO of LiDAR at Valeo has taken over additional responsibilities for Valeo’s autonomy strategy. I interviewed him at CES 2025. According to Mr. Nouvel, “Valeo considers that mobility development is tightly connected with society development – however it comes with frictions (parking, traffic jams) and safety concerns. The mission of Valeo is to maximize society benefits by participating in driving automation initiatives of our OEM and robotaxi customers through well-thought technologies”.
In essence, the societal benefits are framed around four pillars:
- Safety, including ADAS (L3 and pedestrian automatic emergency braking (PAEB) which becomes a mandate in Q42025 in Europe and the US
- Convenience, for example giving car owners time via autonomy and eyes off, minds off driving through L3 or L4 capabilities) with constantly expanding ODDs (operational design domains – geography, speed, weather). It also includes providing more infotainment options.
- Enabling high degree of asset utilization for robotaxi businesses through L4 autonomy
- Sustainability which allows customer to keep their cars, but with refreshed features and performance through modular hardware and software upgrades.
As always, delivering solutions that maximize these benefits to large populations of car owners through affordable prices is critical.
SDV is an important consideration in Valeo’s future product plans. It is a fine balancing act to address immediate needs of the OEMs at an acceptable price point, but future proof cars so that they do not have to be replaced as performance needs increase. For example, packing in extra compute performance ahead of time is likely to be too expensive and will possibly get outdated in the future. The strategy then is to design the compute sub-systems with modular designs so that additional compute and memory capability with advanced technology can be added JIT (Just in Time) and seamlessly as feature capabilities improve and software upgrades are implemented.
Valeo announced at CES 2025 a collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS)to simplify the development process for SDV and enable seamless collaboration with its OEM and robotaxi customers. The Valeo Virtualized Hardware Lab to be launched in Q12025 reduces software development costs and time-to-market for its global customers who can test new software on virtualized Electronic Control Units (vECU) and Sensor Models (VESM) virtually through the AWS cloud platform. For new hardware implementations, Valeo offers the Valeo Cloud Hardware Labwhich will allow customers to access Valeo’s managed large-scale HIL test systems from an AWS-hosted workplace.
Valeo recognizes that autonomy, software and AI are disrupting the automotive market and changing the way its customers and their customers view personal transportation in the future. The goal is to make the car a platform with with periodic improvements in autonomy, infotainment and customer experience features, similar to a smart-phone model but with a safety focus, critical for cars moving at high speeds in cluttered environments.
