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The automotive radar market is forecast to hit 500 million annual sales in 2041
IDTechEx’s report, Automotive Radar Market 2025-2045: Robotaxis & Autonomous Cars, predicts the automotive radar market will hit 500 million annual sales in 2041. The market share today is dominated by the big tier-one companies like Continental, Bosch, Denso, Aptiv, Hella, ZF, and more, but exciting new technologies are coming to market from startups like Arbe, Uhnder, and Zendar. What’s more, there are still new startups being founded in this market, with Waveye, Altos, and Xavveo all coming into existence in the last couple of years. 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.
Junction pedestrian automatic emergency braking is one example of a safety driven application that will drive further adoption of short-range radars.
More than 140 million sensors in 2024, but still room to grow
Automotive radar is now a well-established market. Since the mid-2010s, it has become globally common for cars to have radar-enabled features such as automatic emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, and blind spot detection as at least a specifiable option. Now, in the mid-2020s, many vehicles are sold with these features as standard. In particular, automatic emergency braking is widely included as standard on new cars in a growing and important effort to improve road safety, especially for pedestrians and other vulnerable road users.
In 2024, IDTechEx estimates that 1.53 radars will be shipped for each car, totaling 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. However, a single blind-spot system uses two radars, meaning blind-spot detection is about half as common as adaptive cruise control and automatic emergency braking. Exact deployment numbers of these features captured over multiple sales years can be found in the report with regional granularity.
Pushes for additional and evermore sophisticated safety features in vehicles will be a key driver for short-range radars. Europe is mandating that some heavier vehicle categories have blind spot warning systems from 2024. In the future, it is likely that blind spot detection will be enforced for passenger vehicles, as well as forward cross-traffic and junction emergency braking systems, which require two additional front radars. This means side radar adoption has the potential to grow fourfold over the next 20 years. While forward-facing radars are approaching saturation levels, there is still a lot of room for improving performance.
4D Imaging Radars Are Coming to Market
For a long time, radar’s performance was perfectly adequate for its intended use case, i.e. calculating the distance to the car ahead. But the requirements from the industry are growing, with high-resolution radars being demanded. There are two key drivers for this: safety and convenience. Protecting vulnerable road users is a key driver for new technologies in the automotive industry. Radar has enormous potential here as it can “see” in conditions where cameras and LiDARs are rendered redundant. 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. Additionally, autonomous driving is becoming a reality, but real-world examples today have limitations. With better performance, radar can help overcome those limitations.
4D imaging radar can improve the performance of radar such that they can understand more complex situations, such as separating the car from the bridge in a detection. Expanding on this, next generation radars will detect a person next to the car under the bridge.
4D imaging radars are the emerging next generation, with stacked antenna arrays and hundreds, even thousands of virtual channels. Like pixels in a camera, more virtual channels generally mean better performance, but it isn’t the only factor. This report explains what else it takes to make a 4D imaging radar, who has the most exciting and most market-ready technologies, and where the limitations remain. One key limitation still remaining, and with no simple solution, is the package size of radars.<
Distributed radar could be the next step
When it comes to imaging, bigger is better. This is why camera phones haven’t replaced large DSLR cameras and why the James Webb telescope is over 20ft wide. The same applies to radar; a bigger automotive radar would give better resolution. If a radar was made with an antenna array 2m wide, then its resolution would be similar to a LiDAR. However, the modern flagship radars from leading tier-one suppliers are already hitting the upper limit of what OEMs can integrate, and they are only 10cm by 15cm. The solution that some are pioneering is distributed radar. Putting parts of the radar across the car and creating a much larger virtual antenna. This approach has the potential to return sub-0.1° resolution with all the benefits of imaging with radar, such as distancing, velocity measuring, and its robustness to adverse weather and lighting.
This report and the included company profiles cover a handful of companies working on distributed radar concepts. One is getting close to market deployment, while another has a revolutionary, game-changing proposition for automotive radar, find out which in the report.
This IDTechEx report offers complete coverage of the automotive radar space. It covers the safety and convenience factors driving radar, the areas where the strongest growth is likely to be found, and all the major startup technologies that will define the next generations of radar. All these trends are then captured in IDTechEx 20-year granular forecasts. This report is a complete guide to automotive radar now and in the future.
