Intel's Mobileye has a plan to dominate self-driving:
A lot of media coverage of self-driving technology has focused on a handful of big companies with well-known brands: Google, Uber, Tesla, and GM. But there's another company working on self-driving technology that might ultimately prove even more important. That company is Mobileye, an Israeli startup that was acquired by Intel in 2017.
Mobileye doesn't have Elon Musk's star power or Google's billions. But it has something that's arguably even more important: a dominant position in today's market for advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). Mobileye had a very public split with Tesla back in 2016, but it continues to do business with a lot of other carmakers. Mobileye says it shipped 17.4 million systems last year, which means 17.4 million customers bought cars with Mobileye's cameras, chips, and software.
In a Tuesday speech at the Consumer Electronics show, Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua made clear just how big of a strategic advantage this is. He laid out Mobileye's vision for the evolution of self-driving technology over the next five years. And he made it clear that he envisions Mobileye staying at the center of the industry.
For the last two years, we've touted Cadillac's Super Cruise as the gold standard for ADAS systems. Two features make Super Cruise stand out. First, it uses a driver-facing camera to verify that the driver's eyes are on the road. If not, the system forces the driver to take over. This feature addresses one of the biggest concerns with ADAS systems: that they could make drivers so complacent that they don't intervene when the technology malfunctions.
Second, Cadillac has pre-mapped more than 130,000 miles of freeways in the US and Canada. The system will only engage on those roads, which makes it much less likely that the system will get confused and make a dangerous mistake.
In his Tuesday speech, Mobileye's Shashua calls ADAS systems with high-definition maps, like Super Cruise, "Level 2+"—a small step above regular ADAS systems that are called "level 2" in the five-level SAE framework. A number of carmakers have developed similar systems. Shashua says Mobileye is supplying the technology for 70 percent of them, including systems from Nissan, Volkswagen, and BMW.
As it sells its technology to carmakers, Mobileye has bargained for access to sensor data from customer vehicles. Shashua says that Mobileye is already collecting data from Volkswagen, BMW, and Nissan vehicles. He says three other unnamed carmakers have also agreed to participate.
The scale of this program is massive. Mobileye says it is already collecting 6 million kilometers (3.7 million miles) of sensor data every day from vehicles on public roads. Mobileye expects to have more than 1 million vehicles in its European fleet by the end of 2020, and 1 million American vehicles the following year.
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'Peak hype': why the driverless car revolution has stalled:
By 2021, according to various Silicon Valley luminaries, bandwagoning politicians and leading cab firms in recent years, self-driving cars would have long been crossing the US, started filing along Britain's motorways and be all set to provide robotaxis in London.
1 January has not, however, brought a driverless revolution. Indeed in the last weeks of 2020 Uber, one of the biggest players and supposed beneficiaries, decided to park its plans for self-driving taxis, selling off its autonomous division to Aurora in a deal worth about $4bn (£3bn) – roughly half what it was valued at in 2019.
The decision did not, Uber's chief executive protested, mean the company no longer believed in self-driving vehicles. "Few technologies hold as much promise to improve people's lives with safe, accessible, and environmentally friendly transportation," Dara Khosrowshahi said. But more people might now take that promise with a pinch of salt.
Prof Nick Reed, a transport consultant who ran UK self-driving trials, says: "The perspectives have changed since 2015, when it was probably peak hype. Reality is setting in about the challenges and complexity."
(Score: 1, Touché) by fustakrakich on Monday January 13 2020, @07:47PM (3 children)
This is your future [joblo.com]
Mobileye has bargained for access to sensor data from customer vehicles.
I'm sure they have!
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13 2020, @08:04PM (2 children)
Particularly as technology becomes more prevalent and less user controlled, one should look at who controls the strings of that technology.
Chinese, Israeli, Indian, American, Arab (mostly the Gulf states due to tech investments). All of these places should be of concern, as should the lack of domestic produced technology infrastructure surrounding all of these. With every year the invisible chains that bind us grow stronger, and if we don't pay attention the tightening of those shackles and the sudden blaze of the all seeing eye will blind and enslave us.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 13 2020, @08:27PM (1 child)
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/intel-in-israel.html [intel.com]
Intel has a strong presence in Israel before you take Mobileye into account.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13 2020, @09:26PM
Does Intel have a strong presence in Israel, or does Israel have a strong presence in Intel?
One of those is bad but not malicious, the other, well....
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13 2020, @08:40PM (1 child)
Mobileye has a plan to dominate self driving?
Well, Brain had a plan to take over the world.
Didn't work out for Brain, won't work out for Mobileye, no matter what the hare-brained investors were made to believe.
NERF!!
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday January 14 2020, @04:29AM
MobilEye had functioning tech on the road and logging customer miles in the original Tesla autopilot system, and Tesla's autopilot performance took a huge step backward when they ended that relationship. Given that as evidence that their technology worked well three years ago, I assume it's only gotten better since. It would be unwise to dismiss them out of hand.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday January 14 2020, @12:46AM
Wanna see my newspeak translator? let's test it first.
Google: don't be evil => Google: don't be evil (leave that to us).
Works! Let's try with this newfangled name.
Intel's Mobileye => Intel's Mobileye
Works!
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @01:44AM
I'm gonna invest in these. [amazon.com]
I'm sure Google and their self-driving arm have either pre-mapped lots of roads or are very capable of doing such using their existing google-maps mapping vans.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday January 14 2020, @04:08AM (1 child)
I flat do not trust the cruise control that came installed in my van.
I took it out. Electrically and mechanically.
That is MY van. I am responsible for what it does.
I do not some autopilot, especially one having no knowledge of road conditions and environment, setting my speed. In my mind, those things oughta be illegal. If talking on the phone while driving is called "distracted driving", or driving drunk is called "DUI", what do we call someone who turns control of a car in motion to a machine - even one with one sensor (speed) called?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @01:42PM
but the cruise control is awesome!
keeping your foot locked in a fixed position for hours cannot be good unless you're a member of some fakir cult doing it to honour some god (god of asphalt?).
my lame as foot starts to hurt after 4 hours or so and one condition (of two) when buying a new car was that i dont have to be a fakir, the car has cruise control (the other was that it has a way to recycle break energy back into acceleration).
now the car came with radar cruise control, that is cruise control with eyes. it will not blindly smash into a slower car infront if set at a certain speed. ofc it is very conservative. where i drive the distance kept to the slow car inffront totally invites cars in the back of my robo car to overtake me on the wrong side and then tailgate the slow car infront which leads my polite robo car to back off even more ...
anyways, driver can override by disabling cruise control by pushing on breakpedal (disengage) or overriding (but not disengaging) cruise control by pushing accelerator and doing the tailgating oneself (hopefully leading to a glance up from mobile attention grabbing device into the rear mirror)...
tbh (to be honest) i was abit ... how to say ... sceptical about having a computer connected to my gas pedal.
especially if it's ? the same computer that also has gps, bluetooth, wifi and ... 3G connectivity ... and can be updated... but only by good guys with rock solid authority (feel free to sneeze your sip of coffee now).
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday January 14 2020, @04:22AM (1 child)
Is maintaining a safe road/lane condition database really a feasible strategy? With road construction, accidents, infrastructure decay, etc the derivative on that data has to be pretty high.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @07:04PM
Musk claimed (talk/seminar on autonomy, ~10 months ago?) that first mover advantage plays to Tesla for just this reason. All the Teslas phone home (or will soon) when the onboard video records something new that isn't on the map. Map gets tagged for updating as soon as one Tesla gets to the changed location.
Yes, it's always behind for that first car to get to the change. For the sake of the occupants one can hope that either "Autopilot" gets the car through safely, or the car is under human control at that particular time.