Intel’s Mobileye plans self-driving cars for the masses by ’25
JERUSALEM: Mobileye NV is using the chip-making prowess of parent Intel Corp. to build laser sensors it says will make self-driving cars cheap enough to sell to retail buyers by 2025.
The Jerusalem-based company, which was acquired by Intel in 2017, has about 80% of the global market for advanced driver-assistance vision systems. It’s trying to parlay its dominance in camera-based car technology into a full self-driving sensor suite, including radar and costly laser sensors known as lidar that Mobileye aims to manufacture in-house using an Intel silicon chip.
Cameras and software the Intel division makes currently power car features that help drivers overcome blindspots or stay in their lanes. The company has been growing quickly, and its technology is among the most widely-deployed in fledgling efforts to shift the auto industry to autonomous vehicles.
But it’s still a very small part of Intel, which had annual sales of $72 billion last year.
Intel Chief Executive Officer
AMNON SHASHUA
Bob Swan has praised the division’s efforts and cited it as example of how the chipmaker is diversifying away from a dependence on the personalcomputer market. For Mobileye to make an impact on Intel overall, it’ll have to find products that can be used in tens of millions of new cars and rake in billions of dollars of revenue.
Mobileye chief executive Amnon Shashua says the company is on track to do just that.
“We are in serious discussions with several car manufacturers to start taking this kind of technology,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
Demand for Mobileye’s software-on-a-chip system has exploded as carmakers add more cameras to vehicles for advanced features such as pedestrian detection. Automakers from General Motors Co. to BMW AG to Nissan Motor Co. rely on Mobileye tech for advanced driver-assist features, like Nissan’s Propilot or GM’S Super Cruise, according to Sam Abuelsamid, principal analyst with Guidehouse Insights, a research company.
But Abuelsamid questions the idea that so-called level four technology—which allows automated driving in limited areas— is only four years away from showing up in car-dealer showrooms.
“We’ll see some level four stuff in that same time frame, but it’s going to be fairly limited,” he said.
Mobileye sees a business for full self-driving tech as soon as 2022, when it plans to sell its first level-four systems to commercial robotaxi operators and install it in its own fleet of driverless vehicles. For that system, it will use lidar from Luminar Technologies Inc., which went public in a $3.4-billion reverse merger last month.
Mobileye’s longer-term goal for retail-market vehicles doesn’t involve Luminar. Instead, it envisions using a different laser tech still under development called FMCW, which stands for frequency modulated continuous wave.