In the autonomous driving system of automobile, in order to improve the performance of single-wavelength LIDAR in physical property detection classification and state, and draw lessons from the principle that multi-spectral detection has physical property detection ability, this paper studies the band selection of multi-spectral LIDAR, calculates and analyses the spectrum of typical targets in autonomous driving by using principal component analysis method. The characteristics of laser source and detector, the band selection method of multi-spectral LIDAR, the spectral characteristic analysis of typical targets for autonomous driving application scenarios and the availability of commercial LIDAR are synthesized. The central wavelength of the multi-spectral LIDAR suitable for autonomous driving of automobiles is 808 nm, 905 nm, 1 064 nm and 1 310 nm. The validity of the selected wavelength of the multi-spectral LIDAR is verified by testing.