Mobileye

Earlier this year, Intel announced a deal to acquire Mobileye, an Israel-based company developing autonomous driving technologies, for a staggering $15 billion.

Intel now confirms the closing of the deal and as part of the integration of the company, they announced a new fleet of 100 autonomous test vehicles.
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In the race to develop self-driving cars, companies are racing to make partnerships and acquisitions in order to increase their chances.

BMW, which had already partnered with Intel and Mobileye (before Intel actually acquired Mobileye), is now partnering with Delphi, another major player in the self-driving field.
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Intel’s $15 billion acquisition of Mobileye is all the talk in the auto industry today. The biggest question is how do they value the company at 30 times its projected revenue for the year? It’s a historic acquisition in term of size and valuation. For comparison, Tesla is valued at $40B, about 4 times its projected revenue for the year.

The answer is that Intel sees the acquisition as bringing in-house the “entire package” of autonomous driving. CEO Brian Krzanich wrote in an email to employees today: “this acquisition essentially merges the intelligent eyes of the autonomous car with the intelligent brain that actually drives the car.” The eye being Mobileye and the brain being Intel.

The fact that they are willing to pay $15 billion to accomplish that is quite interesting and somewhat validates Tesla’s own new approach which aims to do same thing since discontinuing Mobileye’s system in the Autopilot. In fact, Tesla considers its in-house efforts an improvement over the Mobileye platform. 
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Intel just paid a staggering $15.3 billion to acquire Mobileye, which was publicly trading at $10.5 billion before the deal was announced this morning. The Israeli company, which was best known by the public as one of the main supplier for Tesla’s first generation Autopilot program, will solidify Intel’s effort in the field of autonomous driving. 
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Since Tesla announced back in October 2016 that all its cars from now on will be equipped with all the necessary hardware to enable self-driving capability through an over-the-air update, other automakers unveiling new cars had to step up their game since the new autonomous technology is expected to be critical to the industry going forward.

When Lucid Motors unveiled its first vehicle last month, the company announced that it would feature autonomous technology, but now it clarified that it will follow Tesla’s lead and equip all cars with the necessary hardware to enable self-driving capability and gradually release more advanced driver assist features leading to full autonomy.

The electric car startup confirmed that Mobileye, Tesla former partner for the Autopilot program, will power its autonomous system.
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The saga of the breakup between Tesla and Mobileye just keeps getting messier. After the comments made by Mobileye CTO Amnon Shashua claiming that Tesla was “pushing the envelope in terms of safety”, Tesla issued a scathing response alleging that Mobileye used some questionable methods to force Tesla to use their system for future generations of the Autopilot.

Today, Mobileye responded to the allegations, partly refuting them, and again reiterating that they initiated the end of the partnership because they disagreed with Tesla on their approach to safety with the Autopilot.

But the statement is surprisingly not trying to refute some of Tesla’s most serious allegations.
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We reported earlier today on comments made by Mobileye CTO Amnon Shashua about what is starting to look like an ugly breakup between the Israel-based maker of driver assistance systems and Tesla. He claimed that Tesla was “pushing the envelope in terms of safety” and that the company wasn’t comfortable with it.

But now Tesla is painting an entirely different picture of the reasons behind the end of the supply relationship. In doing so, Tesla confirmed its in-house ‘Tesla Vision’ product for computer vision and it depicted shady alleged business practices at Mobileye.
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After a very public breakup in July, Tesla CEO Elon Musk decided to refrain from commenting on his company’s relationship with Mobileye, Israel-based maker of collision detection and driver assistance systems and Tesla’s former partner in the development of Autopilot.

But on Wednesday, Mobileye’s chief technology officer, Amnon Shashua, didn’t shy away from commenting on the situation and opened up on what he says led to the end of the relationship.
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Just a few weeks after we mentioned that Mobileye and Tesla were parting ways, yesterday during a press conference, we learned that Mobileye and Delphi Automotive (formerly part of General Motors) are going to partner up to create their own self-driving solution which they aim to have completed and available in 2019.

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We reported this morning that Mobileye confirmed that it will end its partnership with Tesla for the development of the Autopilot program. The company’s EyeQ3 chip, which is currently in Tesla’s vehicles, will still be supported but the company will move away from the system in future iterations of the Autopilot.

Now Tesla CEO Elon Musk commented on the move saying that “it will not have any material effect on [Tesla’s] plans” and that the company will focus on a more integrated system.
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In a conference call discussing its second quarter financial results today, Mobileye confirmed that it will end its partnership with Tesla for the development of the Autopilot program. Tesla’s Autopilot system was designed in-house by the automaker and uses several different components, but Mobileye was an important partner supplying its EyeQ chip which processes the information from the Autopilot sensor’s suite.

The reason for the two companies parting ways is not entirely clear at this point, but based on Mobileye CTO Amnon Shashua’s comments, it might have something to do with the aftermath of the fatal Autopilot accident in a Model S, which first surfaced a few weeks ago.
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Following a fatal Model S crash on Autopilot reported earlier this week, one of Tesla’s main supplier for the Autopilot program, Mobileye, commented on the accident and explained that its Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) wasn’t meant to avoid the impact.

Tesla has since responded to Mobileye’s statement, which we added to our article on the comment, but it’s worth elaborating on the differences between the systems as we recently learned more about them through tests earlier this week, and the tragic accident which is only now coming to light.
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Mobileye, an Israel-based tech company developing some of the technology behind Tesla’s Autopilot, commented on the fatal Model S crash reported yesterday. A spokesperson said that the company’s current Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) system is only meant for rear-end collision avoidance and since the crash was front (of the Model S) to side (of a truck), the system was not designed to avoid it.
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Just a few weeks after we learned that BMW is putting its electric vehicle programs on the “back burner” in order to focus its ‘i’ brand, under which the German automaker has been releasing its electric vehicles, on self-driving cars instead. We now learn that the automaker is reportedly about to announce an important partnership with Intel and Mobileye to develop its self-driving cars.
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A new report published today by Israel’s Globes suggests that Elon Musk visited Israel-based tech firm Mobileye to test a new system for the next generation Tesla Autopilot.

According to Globes, Musk visited Mobileye’s Israel operations earlier this month for a “demonstration of several breakthrough developments by Mobileye in [automated driving technology] installed on a trial Tesla Model S vehicle.”

The report suggests that Mobileye is testing its automated driving technology in two Tesla Model S test vehicles. Independently, a Model S being tested with a fully-autonomous hardware suite was recently spotted in California.
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Mobileye, an Israel-based tech company, is quickly becoming the leader in driver assist and autonomous driving features. The company now boasts that 90% of automakers are using its products, and to leverage its popularity, Mobileye is launching a new mapping technology, which crowdsources real-time data from drivers and it hopes that automakers will share the data to create a constantly updating global digital map to guide self-driving cars in the future.
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Following the coverage of George Hotz’s new self-driving car project yesterday, the stock price of Tesla’s partner for the Autopilot, Mobileye, took a 7% hit during the day. Citron Research called the company “the short of 2016“.

[tweet https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/677403793651175424 align=’center’]

But early this morning, Musk took to Twitter to say that Bloomberg’s article on the project was inaccurate and he shared a blog post from Tesla explaining why.
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