Chapter 11: Mobileye Driverless Tech and Global Partnerships

Mobileye was founded in 1999 by Hebrew University professor Amnon Shashua, who
had developed a technical solution for a vision system that could detect vehicles using a camera
and software algorithms on a processor. Partnering with Ziv Aviram, Amnon set up the
company’s R&D headquarters in Jerusalem, Israel. Some of the company’s first customers
include BMW, General Motors and Volvo. As it evolved, Mobileye improved on its technology to
the point that it is today one of the leading corporations with over 1,400 employees in Israel
alone to compete in the crowded race to make and sell fully autonomous vehicles.

Vehicle Automation
While many companies have developed self-driving cars, no one has developed a truly
autonomous vehicle. The U.S.-based Society of Automotive Engineers’ standard J3016 defines
six levels of vehicle automation going from Level 0 to 5. Level 0 represents features limited to
providing warnings and momentary assistance like “blind sport warning” (see SAE J3016). Level
5 is the most sophisticated where the car can drive by itself on any road with no one inside.
Mobileye hopes to beat its competitors to the market by developing a commercialized car that
can perform at Level 4 by 2024. Level 4 means that the vehicle will be able to operate with
limited human input and oversight in specific conditions. After that, the company hopes to
quickly move to Level 5, where vehicles can operate on any road and in any condition without a
human driver. Experts predict that such types of vehicles will be seen on the road by 2030.

Cite: https://www.sae.org/news/2019/01/sae-updates-j3016-automated-driving-graphic
Partnering for Automation
As a result of their success, Mobileye has attracted significant attention from many
potential partners and acquirers. In 2015, Tesla Motors decided to use Mobileye’s technology to
enable it self-drive solution. In 2017, Intel purchased Mobileye for $15.3 billion, the largest
acquisition of an Israeli company to date. Not too long afterwards, Mobileye, Intel and BMW
announced that they were partnering to develop autonomous vehicles to the consumer market
in 2021. The three companies also partnered with the German maker of Mercedes Benz,
Daimler in 2019. Mobileye, BMW, Daimler and Intel committed 1,200 technicians to the task of
developing new autonomous systems with the goal of getting them on the road by 2024. In
addition to these partnerships, Mobileye has other partnerships with Nissan, VW and Nokia
through their ties with BMW.
In addition to these partnerships, in 2018 Mobileye partnered with the Chinese tech
company Baidu to help them ramp up their self-driving car platform. In the later part of 2019
CEO Amnon Shashua announced that two Chinese partners--Beijing Public Transport
Corporation and Beijing Beytai--will tap its technology to develop autonomous public
transportation services in China. In all, Mobileye has over 25 partnerships with automakers and
other tech companies.
Mobileye is not unique in their hyper-partnering strategy to develop self-driving
technology. The Automated Driving Vehicles Leaderboard from Navigant Research show some
evidence for the need of research partnerships to help make autonomous cars a reality. Part of
the reason is that such innovations require a combination of traditional engineering skills around
mechanical and electrical engineering with skills around software development and computer
engineering. Integrating cutting edge knowledge from all of these areas requires a tremendous
amount of collaboration and communication.
Automakers are recognizing that coming up with self-driving vehicles is much more
difficult and costly than they had originally thought. As stated by Sam Abuelsamid, principal
analyst of Navigant Research, “The development costs are high and the near-term returns are
going to be lower than what they had expected two or three year ago. So they’re trying to figure
it out.” Despite promises by car companies that they would have fully autonomous self-driving
vehicles in the early 2020s, this is turning out to be much more difficult than expected.
Partnerships represent a way to spread out the costs and complexity of developing this
technology. Because developing the technology requires multiple computers and software
stacks to compete with each other and cross-check each other’s work, partnerships bring a
requisite variety of knowledge to the complex environment. As stated by Sam, “If one algorithm
is not recognizing a person standing on the curb, and another algorithm is recognizing it, then
you know there’s an issue that has to be addressed. Partnerships allow them to combine what
they’re doing, without having to develop a separate software stack to run against the primary
one.”
Questions

1. Which company do you believe will be the first to develop a Level 5 self-driving vehicle?

Source: https://www.designnews.com/electronics-test/study-partnerships-will-be-key-autonomous-vehicle-
development/153496215560427

2. Considering the needs of research and development, how does this partnering model fit
into the need for companies to globalize their R&D?

3. What are the challenges of partnering outside of the company for R&D that are not
present in developing multiple R&D centers that remain inside the company?

References

"Intel buys driverless car technology firm Mobileye". BBC. 13 March 2017. Retrieved 13 March 2017.

2017-03-13). "‫ אינטל מאשרת את חשיפת‬TheMarker: ‫ מיליארד דולר – שוק ההון‬15.3-‫"תרכוש את מובילאיי ב‬. TheMarker. Retrieved 2017-
03-18.

Sarah, Viva (2014-03-23). "What drives Israel's serial entrepreneurs?". ISRAEL21c. Retrieved 2017-03-18.

"BMW Group, Intel and Mobileye will have autonomous test vehicles on the roads by the second half of 2017" (PDF). 4
January 2017.

https://www.cbinsights.com/research/autonomous-driverless-vehicles-corporations-list/

https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/11/mobileye-plans-to-deploy-fully-autonomous-cars-in-4-years/

https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/03/baidu-partners-with-intel-and-mobileye-to-enhance-its-self-driving-platform/

https://www.designnews.com/electronics-test/study-partnerships-will-be-key-autonomous-vehicle-
development/153496215560427