The automotive radar market (think vehicle safety features) is anticipated to reach 500 million annual sales in 2041, according to IDTechEx’s latest 2024-2025 report on robotaxis and autonomous vehicles.
While today’s market share is dominated by big tier-one companies like Continental, Bosch, Denso, Aptiv, Hella, ZF, and others, IDTechEx said exciting new technologies are coming to market from startups like Arbe, Uhnder, and Zendar. New startups are also still being founded within the market, such as Waveye, Altos, and Xavveo.
“The market is well established with commodity short-range and long-range radar, 4D imaging radar is now emerging and seeing uptake from early adopters, but there are technologies on the horizon that could completely revolutionize automotive radar,” said IDTechEx in its update.
They said many vehicles are sold with radar-enabled features like automatic emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, and blind spot detection, either as an option or standard. IDTechEx estimates that last year 1.53 radars were shipped for each car, for a total of more than 140 million units.
“However, there is still lots of room for growth. This IDTechEx report finds that approximately half of radar sales are long-range radars for forward-facing applications, while the other half is short-range radars for applications like blind spot detection and warning,” said the company — noting that a single blind-spot system uses two radars, which means the blind-spot feature is about half as common as adaptive cruise control and automatic emergency braking.
IDTechEx also underlined that 4D imaging radars are coming to market. They were originally used to calculate the distance to the car ahead, but industry requirements are growing. Now high-resolution radars are in demand.
“Radar has enormous potential here as it can ‘see’ in conditions where cameras and LiDARs are rendered redundant,” said IDTechEx. “However, radars of old don’t have the imaging performance to confidently separate a human that is standing next to a car from the car itself. This is a key task when trying to accomplish perfect automatic emergency braking performance in all conditions.”
More information is available via the online report.
