Radars have had a place within the automotive sector for over two decades, beginning with the first use for adaptive cruise control and many other developments taking place since. IDTechEx’s “Automotive Radar Market 2025-2045: Robotaxis & Autonomous Cars” report explores the latest developments in radar technology within the automotive sector.
ADAS safety systems
ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems) encompass all the automated features of vehicles, including adaptive cruise control, automatic emergency brakes, and blind spot detection. Adaptive cruise control maintains the vehicle’s speed until it encounters slower traffic, whereby the vehicle then uses radar technology to keep a safe distance behind the driver in front. In the same way, automatic braking uses radars to detect close gaps between vehicles in order to signal the car to break. Blind spot detection uses short-range radars to detect vehicles within the driver’s blind spots and utilizes LEDs to alert the driver.
Front and side radar positions
Radars are comprised of five components: the radome, antenna array, shielding, radar circuit board, and housing. The vehicle’s front radar detects objects in the vehicle’s oncoming path and is responsible for enabling adaptive cruise control and automatic emergency braking. With these tasks in mind, front radars tend to prioritize angular resolution and range rather than wide fields of view. The side radars are responsible for blind spot detection, lane change assist, cross-traffic detection, and junction pedestrian automatic emergency braking. Between two and six side radars are necessary for a vehicle to support these features. Unlike long-range radars, short-range radars require a wide field of view, with range being less of a priority.
Honda was one example of a manufacturer utilizing additional SSRs at the front of its vehicles to enable its SENSING 360 ADAS package. These are used for front cross-traffic warning, lane change assist on motorways, and advanced pedestrian detection before making turns. IDTechEx predicts features like these will become more mainstream over the next two decades to increase pedestrian safety.
Camera-based alternatives
Two hindrances to the uptake of radar technology include cost and certain performance requirements. One of the main alternatives to radar technology in ADAS is cameras. Automatic emergency braking and adaptive cruise control can be enabled with front-facing cameras where radar is too expensive for some OEMs to still provide efficient ADAS. For companies such as Tesla, vision-based technology has been preferable for their self-driving systems, as it has provided higher resolution images for its onboard AI to work with, although radar technologies have improved more in recent years.
Autonomy and the future of automotive radar technology
As autonomous vehicles become more widespread and more capable of offering self-driving features, radars around the vehicle will require better imaging performance to increase safety. This includes robotaxis, which will require many radars to ensure that if one of the vehicle’s sensors fails, there are backups to still cover all the areas around the vehicle.
With radar technology becoming cheaper and, therefore, more widely available, these ADAS system features are offered by many vehicle manufacturers. IDTechEx provides data on the growth of radar technology within the automotive market, and the availability of resultant features. In “Automotive Radar Market 2025-2045: Robotaxis & Autonomous Cars”, IDTechEx predicts that the automotive radar market will grow with a CAGR of 4.8% between 2024 and 2034. The report goes into greater detail on different radar frequencies and emission waveforms.
