For autonomous vehicles and car companies, 2016 was a heady year. Multimillion-dollar investments in self-driving technologies were heralded on a weekly basis, and then Ford made an audacious prediction: It would mass-produce self-driving cars for consumers by 2021.
That era “was insane with announcements,” said Alan Hall, a Ford communications manager at the time, “and 2021 was the magic number.”
Five years after that missed goal, fully autonomous vehicles festooned with sensors still aren’t for sale, robotaxis haunt only a handful of cities, and self-driving trucks are still limited to pilot projects. Moreover, many of those autonomous-vehicle darlings of 2016 have since thrown in the towel, such as Luminar, which declared bankruptcy last December, and the robotaxi company Cruise, which General Motors shuttered in 2024 to refocus its efforts on personal vehicles.
But as the autonomous dreams of a decade ago succumbed to practical challenges, other companies have found new applications for their innovations, such as ground-penetrating radar, 3-D radar and advanced lidar (which stands for light detection and ranging).
These new applications cover a diversity of uses, including smart city systems and in-home elder care services, as well as managing 1,500-ton gantries in shipyards and monitoring 800-foot-tall wind turbines. Such technology is even being used to improve robots and artificial intelligence systems.
Lidar has experienced the widest adoption. Lidar sensors can generate three-dimensional views of their surroundings by bouncing near-infrared light off objects. The technology can create detailed data for traffic monitoring systems, where regular video cameras can be stymied by bright daylight or total darkness.
Ouster, a company that bought the lidar pioneer Velodyne, has customers including John Deere, for farming applications, and cities, for traffic management. It has sensors installed in hundreds of intersections in cities including Chattanooga, Tenn., according to Angus Pacala, a founder of Ouster.
Omer Keilaf, the chief and founder of Innoviz, another lidar company, said the technology could also gauge the size of vehicles for charging tolls.
A lidar company called Outsight uses lidar to monitor pedestrian traffic in airports, including Dallas Fort Worth International. The data allows for monitoring where video surveillance may be impractical or undesirable because of privacy concerns.
The improvements made to develop lidar for cars — making them smaller and more impervious to the elements — also sharpened the technology for other challenging outdoor uses, such as security systems for military installations and critical infrastructure.
“The most obvious example is a remote facility like a data center in the woods,” Mr. Pacala said. At night, video cameras can’t see very far, and metal fences and power lines cause problems for traditional radar, Mr. Keilaf from Innoviz added. Consequently, human guards often have to patrol the fence lines of such facilities, whereas lidar can do the same job, seeing far into the dark without blinking.
At the same time, standard radar systems used in cars for collision avoidance and adaptive cruise control have evolved to what are known as millimeter wave radar systems to compete with lidar. In cars, these sensors can see farther and with more accuracy in poor weather than earlier radar systems.
Now the technology is looking for broader uses.
Not quite a decade ago, a company called Pontosense was using “mmwave” radar to alert drivers to a child’s presence in the back seat. It could also monitor the health of a passenger or driver by detecting a person’s breathing and heart rate.
Still, automotive adoption was slow. So about four years ago Pontosense began to tap into the growing demand from older people who want to safely remain in their homes but cannot afford, or don’t yet require, constant caregiving.
These monitoring systems can track people, even in private spaces like bathrooms and bedrooms, without intrusive video recording. The data is detailed enough to raise an alarm when a person has fallen or is having trouble breathing, but because there’s no video picture, the homeowner retains a sense of privacy.
Another technology it was once hoped would guide self-driving cars is ground-penetrating radar. It can see several feet underground and was used commercially to detect buried pipes and conduits and was initially conceived of for military applications, including autonomous armored vehicles.
In 2017 a ground-penetrating-radar company called WaveSense was founded, intending to track the locations of self-driving cars without GPS and in situations where the road surface might have changed — say, thanks to repaving or snow accumulation. But as that market failed to materialize, WaveSense changed its name to GPR Ground Positioning Radar and began developing its technology for shipping and seaports.
To automate seaports like the one in Rotterdam using established technology requires tearing up infrastructure to bury transponders and create geotagged locations. But with ground-penetrating radar, “we don’t need to bury anything,” said Tom Cashman, the chief technology officer at BTG Positioning Systems, a Dutch company that manages automated container ports and acquired GPR last fall. Mr. Cashman said the technology was being tested but suggested that further advancements could allow municipalities to use the technology to detect potholes and sinkholes — before they occurred.
Self-driving technology was the darling of futurists a decade ago, and now its advancements are trickling down to the latest fascination: artificial intelligence and robots.
At Boston Dynamics, Zack Jackowski, the chief product and technology officer, said robotics were benefiting from lessons learned in the automotive arena. Among them are improved high dynamic range cameras, microprocessors that meet rigorous safety standards and more affordable lidar sensors.
Boston Dynamics, whose majority owner is Hyundai, is collaborating with the automaker on a humanoid robot called Atlas. Mr. Jackowski said almost everyone on the company’s safety and perception teams had come from autonomous vehicle companies such as Waymo and Zoox. “They are grappling with the same safety issues we are dealing with,” he said.
Costs are falling, too, allowing for this tech to show up in consumer electronics like robot lawn mowers and vacuums, outfitted with lidar sensors, said Stefan Sellhusen, director of engineering automated driving at Bosch.
Even with all the consolidation and delays, veterans of the self-driving-car wars are convinced that autonomous vehicles are still the future. Before founding the self-driving-truck technology company Kodiak, Don Burnette began his career in Google’s self-driving program (now Waymo) and then co-founded Otto, which was later acquired by Uber. Referring to Kodiak’s commercial truck testing program, he said: “We are out there. It’s here. It’s small, but you have to start small.”
Mr. Hall is now at a robotaxi company called Motional. “It’s going to take time, but it’s going to happen,” he said, while acknowledging the tendency of some in the industry to be a little overly optimistic. “It’s like 2026 is the new 2021.”
