Swedish automaker Volvo has cancelled a five-year-old contract with Luminar, the latest escalation in an increasingly-ugly brawl between the lidar sensor company and its biggest customer.
The fight is happening during an existential moment for Luminar. The company recently defaulted on several of its loans. While it’s working with those lenders on a resolution, Luminar has warned investors it may have to declare bankruptcy.
To stave that off, Luminar recently laid off 25% of its staff and is trying to sell itself — or parts of itself — to potential buyers. One of them is Luminar founder Austin Russell, who resigned from the CEO role in May during an ethics inquiry. Luminar is also being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, recent filings reveal.
“Volvo Cars has made this decision to limit the company’s supply chain risk exposure and it is a direct result of Luminar’s failure to meet its contractual obligations to Volvo Cars,” the automaker said in a statement to TechCrunch. Luminar did not respond to a request for comment.
Volvo is not just a Luminar customer. The two companies have spent much of the last decade working together. Volvo invested in Luminar and helped the Florida-based startup get into some of its first production vehicles.
The relationship has been mutually beneficial. Luminar’s tech gave Volvo the confidence to dish out big promises about making the roads safer by offering automated driving features. Volvo gave Luminar credibility ahead of a 2020 SPAC merger that made Russell one of the youngest self-made billionaires ever.
But Luminar has faced challenges as a public company. It struggled to diversify away from Volvo, and in 2024 cut a fifth of its staff while deciding to outsource manufacturing of its sensors. Then, in May of this year, Russell abruptly resigned as Luminar revealed its board had opened a “code of business conduct and ethics” inquiry.
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The fight with Volvo bubbled to the surface on October 31.
The company told shareholders in a regulatory filing on that day that Volvo decided to no longer make Luminar’s “Iris” lidar a standard sensor on its EX90 and ES90 vehicles. Volvo also told Luminar that it had “deferred” the decision of whether to include its next-generation “Halo” sensor in the Swedish automaker’s future vehicles.
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