After a few days at IAA Transportation in Hanover, one thing is clear: the conversation around autonomy is becoming much more practical. The industry is moving beyond asking “what's possible?” and focusing increasingly on what can actually be deployed, integrated, and scaled. That distinction matters.
Across commercial vehicles, industrial mobility, and autonomous systems, I heard many of the same priorities: technology needs to perform reliably in real-world environments, integrate with increasingly complex sensor stacks, and deliver a clear path from development to deployment.
It reinforced several things we strongly believe at MicroVision®.
First, there is no single sensor – or even single lidar configuration – that fits every application. Different environments require different ranges, fields of view, form factors, and architectures. Flexibility matters.
This was reinforced by what’s driving the market right now. With R151 (blind spot/side detection) and R159 (moving off/frontal detection) pushing vulnerable road user, or VRU, protection to the top of the priority list for EU commercial vehicle OEMs, no single sensor, lidar included, can cover the full set of zones and ranges these regulations require. Meeting them takes side coverage, front coverage, and near-field detection working together, which is exactly why the industry is converging on fused, multi-sensor architectures rather than any one technology doing it alone.
Second, openness matters. As autonomy expands across vehicles, industrial equipment, and other machines, customers need the freedom to build the sensor architecture that works for their specific application rather than being locked into a closed ecosystem.
That is why I was particularly excited to introduce our MicroVision® Perception Platform™ at IAA Transportation. By bringing together our lidar hardware, perception software, and support for third-party sensor integration in a modular architecture, we're building toward the flexibility customers need as these markets mature.
The opportunity ahead isn't simply about putting more sensors on machines. It's about making those machines more capable of understanding and operating within the world around them – and doing it in a way that can actually be commercialized at scale.
There were many great conversations in Hanover, and we leave even more energized about where this industry is headed.