A new ‘color’ Lidar breakthrough just made 'hands-off' self-driving cars a reality, experts say — Chinese tech will 'significantly enhance' spatial intelligence and reduce the need to 'guess' objects like traffic lights Hesai says full-color platform delivers “world-leading” capabilities Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more. You are now subscribed Your newsletter sign-up was successful Join the club Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards. - The world's biggest Lidar maker just unveiled its next-gen technology - The system can detect color, velocity and reflectivity - The tech is expected to hit the market later this year The world's biggest Lidar sensor manufacturer has just announced a next-gen version of its technology that is tipped to give self-driving cars a huge reliability boost. Hesai Group announced this week that its new color-capable Lidar, called its '6D ETX full-color platform', is able to detect the X, Y and Z coordinates of an object, plus its reflectivity, velocity and color, according to the South China Morning Post. Compared to the black-and-white imaging that is currently returned by most systems on the market, Hesai Group’s ability to detect color, as well as any reflectivity and velocity, is expected to vastly improve the speed at which autonomous driving systems can determine and categorize objects, such as road sigs, traffic lights and emergency service vehicles. Article continues belowHesai CEO David Li Yifan claims that the first iterations of the technology will hit the market later this year, stating that they will be the first of their kind. However, the CEO stopped short of revealing which brands would be receiving the Lidar system first. “This is not some kind of market hype,” he said in a media briefing on Friday. “It is a