Mobileye, the AV division of Intel, has agreed to supply an unnamed European car manufacturer with autonomous driving technology for eight million cars, Reuters reports. Mobileye is forging ahead with testing in its home city of Jerusalem, Israel.
Intel bought Mobileye in 2017 for US$15.3bn, to be able to compete in the AV technology arms race. The company says it has a 70% market share in driver assistance systems.
The deal is slated to begin in 2021, with the release of the EyeQ5 chip, which should allow Level 5 autonomy and is a replacement for the soon-to-be-released EyeQ4.
Intel and Mobileye are currently rolling out their 100-car AV fleet in Jerusalem. “Jerusalem is notorious for aggressive driving,” says Amnon Shashua, Mobileye’s chief executive.
“There aren’t perfectly marked roads. And there are complicated merges. People don’t always use crosswalks. You can’t have an autonomous car traveling at an overly cautious speed, congesting traffic or potentially causing an accident. You must drive assertively and make quick decisions like a local driver.”
To begin with, the cars rely solely on an array of 12 cameras eight providing long-range surround view and four cameras guiding parking. They don’t use lidar at the moment because Mobileye wants to prove that safe AVs be achieved using only cameras, allowing for true redundancy once other systems are introduced. They say this approach also limits the amount of data that needs to be processed.
By Illya Verpraet