Argo LiDAR has 400 Meter Range

How much does it add to effectiveness in context? 

 Argo AI says its latest LiDAR sensor has a 400-meter range

The tech could bolster Ford and Volkswagen's self-driving ambitions. In Engadget, Kris Holt @krisholt, May 4th, 2021

Argo AI has made some waves in the autonomous vehicle space over the last few years, with investors Volkswagen and Ford working on cars that use its self-driving tech. The company suggests it's taken a significant step towards bringing autonomous vehicles to roads. Argo created a LiDAR sensor that's said to have a range of 400 meters, which it believes it the longest range of any current LiDAR sensor.   .. "

VW Will Design its own Self-Driving Chips

 Perhaps expected, adds some control, link to driving data

VW will design its own chips for self-driving cars in Engadget

It's borrowing its strategy from Apple and Tesla.

Volkswagen won't settle for off-the-shelf computing power with its self-driving cars. As Reuters (via Autoblog) reports, company chief Herbert Diess told Handelsblatt in an interview that VW will design its own high-performance chips for autonomous vehicles. It was a matter of eking out the best possible hardware, Diess said — much like Apple and Tesla, the move would give VW "higher competence" in defining its processors.  ... ' 

VW Uses D-Wave for Quantum Chemistry

VW Solves Quantum Chemistry Problems on a D-Wave Machine 

IEEE Spectrum   By Mark Anderson

VW Solves Quantum Chemistry Problems on a D-Wave Machine

Scientists say their work offers a proof of principle for using D-Wave’s quantum computers to tackle even tougher chemistry problems  .... 

 " ... D-Wave computers are known as “quantum annealers,” running complex circuits using the machine’s 128,000 superconducting Josephson junctions. The integrated superconducting circuit, cooled down to thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, contains 2,048 quantum bits (qubits) and 6,016 interconnections (a.k.a. couplers) between qubits. It is called an annealer because the circuit begins in one state and then slowly transitions through to its final state, with its individual qubits representing distillations of an answer. ... "

Researchers at Volkswagen in Germany and the U.S. have used a D-Wave 2000Q quantum computer to solve rudimentary quantum chemistry problems. The researchers ran D-Wave computations that identified the ground-state energies of molecular hydrogen and lithium hydride. Although both molecules are well known and well studied, the Volkswagen researchers established an increasingly computational route to exploring chemistry in the quantum realm. The researchers also enumerated a list of quantum chemistry simulation goals that sufficiently robust quantum computation should address, such as: designing next-generation batteries; optimizing solar cells via detailed study of photosynthesis, and faithfully simulating complex molecules without restoring to approximations that conventional computers use to make such simulations tractable.  .... "