Today’s driverless cars under development at companies like General Motors, Toyota, Uber and the Google spinoff Waymo track their surroundings using a wide variety of sensors, including cameras, radar, GPS antennas and lidar (short for “light detection and ranging”) devices that measure distances using pulses of light.

But there are gaps in the way these sensors operate, and combining their disparate streams of data is difficult. Aeva’s prototype — a breed of lidar that measures distances more accurately and also captures speed — aims to fill several of these sizable holes.