They've got a normal lidar unit they are shipping or at least offering dev kits for now (similar to velodyne puck at a lower price point and less scanning lines). So they are at least doing something in terms of real products.
From what I've managed to gather from poking around a bit, I'd guess they're using a very fancy waveguide based sensor similar to this, but a more simple emitter as a way to save cost on their first generation solid state product.
I've heard also 2017 as well... but also would be curious to see any actual progress.
We had one of the mechanical Quanergy sensors at my last job, and I worked on integrating it with ROS and doing some mapping with it. It was slow, not well constructed (it kind of vibrated when rotating), and didn't return intensity information (though it's possible a software update could change that).
At $8000 (later dropped to ~$5600), it was poor value. I've never used a velodyne, but I looked over the marketing materials for the VLP-16 puck and it seems like a much more well thought out product. This makes sense as Quanergy is only selling mechanical LIDARs as a bridge, but the fact remains that they aren't very good.
From what I've managed to gather from poking around a bit, I'd guess they're using a very fancy waveguide based sensor similar to this, but a more simple emitter as a way to save cost on their first generation solid state product.
I've heard also 2017 as well... but also would be curious to see any actual progress.