Parts-makers team on self-drive system

Auto-parts suppliers Mobileye NV and Delphi Automotive PLC said they are teaming up to develop a low-cost system for self-driving vehicles that will be available to carmakers by the end of the decade.

The companies are spending “hundreds of millions of dollars” to develop the system, which will be ready to sell by 2019, Kevin Clark, chief executive officer of U.K.-based Delphi, said in a conference call Tuesday.

Their technology will rely less on costly lidar sensors, which bounce light off objects to assess shape and location, resulting in a more affordable system for carmakers that might lack funding to develop the technology on their own, Amnon Shashua, chairman and chief technology officer of Israel-based Mobileye, said on the call.

“Together, we’re planning to build a new class of machine intelligence capable of mimicking true human driving capabilities,” Shashua said. “Our alliance provides a solution with a much smaller investment to our customers” to deploy fully autonomous cars.

Automakers and technology companies are scrambling for partnerships to compete in self-driving technology with Alphabet Inc.’s Google, which has already clocked 1.8 million miles of public road tests. Uber Technologies Inc. last week announced a $300 million development deal with Volvo AB. Ford Motor Co. last week pledged it would have fully self-driving cars for ride hailing by 2021 and has jointly invested $150 million with China’s Baidu Inc. in Velodyne Lidar Inc.