Mobileye secures order for self-driving cars

The autonomous car division of tech company Intel has secured a contract to outfit eight million cars with self-driving capabilities, an executive told Reuters in mid-May.

Erez Dagan, senior vice-president for advanced development and strategy at Intel’s Israel-based Mobileye branch, wouldn’t disclose which European automaker placed the order, or outline the financial terms of the deal.

The advanced driver-assisted systems to be outfitted to the cars will be based on Intel’s EyeQ5 chip, due in 2021 and designed to be capable of fully autonomous driving. That chip will be an upgrade of the EyeQ4 that Mobileye will unveil in the next few weeks.

“The future system will be available on a variety of the automaker’s car models that will have partial (Level 3) automation — where the car is automatically driven but the driver must stay alert — as well as models integrating a more advanced (Level 4) system,” reports Reuters.

Mobileye, which was bought by Intel for US$15.3 billion last year, says it controls more than 70 per cent of the driver-assistance tech market. It’s currently working with a number of automakers — General Motors, Nissan, Audi, BMW, Honda and Fiat Chrysler among them — on next-gen Level 3 driverless car tech, to debut next year.

While consumer-owned, selfdriving cars are a ways off, Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua says “robo-taxis” could arrive on public streets by 2021.

He noted, too, that the streets of Israel, where the company does most of its testing, were a particularly suitable site for the technology’s development, since Mobileye wants its vehicles to drive like humans, and in Jerusalem the “driving culture is very assertive.”

Shashua added that when selfdriving car technologies do come to market not long after 2021, they would almost certainly debut on luxury vehicles, at a premium of about $12,000 per car.