More autonomous cars on the road

Amnon Shashua CEO Mobileye

Five years ago, tech and auto companies thought they were about to put self-driving robotaxis on the street to carry passengers without a human driver.

Then an Uber autonomous test vehicle hit and killed a pedestrian in Arizona.

Yet the technology is moving ahead, says Amnon Shashua, co-founder and CEO of Mobileye, which has pioneered partially automated driver-assist systems and fully autonomous technology.

Shashua talked with The Associated Press about the next steps toward autonomous vehicles.

With problems at Cruise and recalls of Tesla’s partially automated driving systems, what do you see as the future of autonomous vehicles?

I would frame it as three stories. The first one is about safety. Today you have a front-facing camera, sometimes the front-facing radar. There are functions that enable accident avoidance. You can take safety to a much higher degree by having multiple cameras around the car and provide a much higher level of safety. An accident would be very rare. The second story is to add more redundant sensors like a front-facing lidar (laser), like imaging radars and start enabling an eyes-off (the road) system so it’s hands-free, hands-off (the steering wheel). You are allowed legally not to pay attention and not to be responsible for driving on certain roads. It could start from highways and then add secondary roads... Then comes this third story. This is the robotaxi where there’s no driver, and we are utilizing the car to a much higher level and enable moving people like Uber and Lyft at a much more efficient, economical state because you don’t have a driver.

When do you see a lot of fully autonomous vehicles on the roads?

If you look at the success of Waymo, its challenge is not technological. It’s more about how to scale and build a business. Deployment of these kinds of robotaxis is slower than originally expected five years ago. But it is something that is really, really happening. Mobileye is working with Volkswagen on the ID. Buzz (van) to start deploying thousands of such vehicles in 2026.

Will Mobileye be responsible legally for the eyes-off system, or is the automaker?

If a driver works on a smartphone and there is an accident, you cannot come to the driver and say you are responsible, because I allowed you to do something else. So this means that the bar in terms of performance of the system ... should be very high, much higher than human statistics.

What do you think of Tesla’s Autopilot and “Full Self-Driving”?

Tesla’s technical capabilities are very high. The question is whether this kind of system powered by only cameras can eventually be an eyes-off. This is where we part ways. We believe that we need additional sensors for redundancy. It’s not just a matter of improving the algorithms, adding more compute. You need to create redundancies, from a sensor point of view and from the compute point of view.