Indra Picks Ouster (OUST) Lidar for Its Toll Systems, Which Cover 3,300 Lanes and 5 Million Trips a Day
Spanish technology group Indra has selected Ouster’s 3D digital lidar sensors for its electronic toll collection projects worldwide. The companies announced it on November 10. Indra has already installed hundreds of Ouster’s Rev7 sensors on toll gantries across the Americas and Europe, so this extends an existing rollout. Neither side disclosed contract value or unit numbers.
Indra’s toll systems run more than 3,300 lanes and handle about 5 million trips a day. The company has built over 2,500 mobility projects in more than 50 countries.
What lidar does on a toll gantry
A toll system has to know what just drove under it: car, van or truck, how many axles, how big. That decides the charge. Many gantries used older 2D lidar or loop sensors in the road for this.
Swapping in Ouster’s Rev7 gave Indra 360-degree, long-range coverage across more lanes from one sensor, with enough resolution to measure a vehicle’s size and volume. It also keeps working in rain, fog and darkness, where cameras struggle.
That matters most for free-flow tolling, where there are no booths or barriers and traffic passes at highway speed across several lanes. Indra is now testing Ouster’s newer Rev8, which adds native color sensing to the 3D image, aimed at exactly that kind of high-speed, multi-lane detection.
Indra’s tolling director, Javier Rojo, said the lidar boosts the performance of its toll solutions and that he expects to keep expanding with Ouster in the US and elsewhere.
Why Ouster wants roadside work
For Ouster, toll gantries are steadier business than cars. Automotive lidar depends on long vehicle design cycles. Infrastructure buyers order sensors for projects that run for years. Ouster’s sensors also meet the Build America, Buy America rules that apply to federally funded US transport projects, which helps with US toll and traffic contracts.
The deal comes days after Ouster reported third-quarter revenue of $59.3 million, up about 50% from $39.5 million a year earlier, driven mostly by robotics and drone customers. The Indra news adds a big infrastructure name to that mix, though without numbers it’s hard to say how much revenue it brings.