Analysis of MobilEye strategy in robocars and video interview with CEO Amnon Shashua

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It doesn't get as much coverage as others, but MobilEye has amassed an impressive portfolio of components to give them a shot at the robotaxi and robocar world (one of the few with a shot at both.)

Today I release both a new article with my analysis of their strategy and components, and also a video I made of an interview with Amnon Shashua, the founder and CEO of MobilEye, which is now a unit of Intel but will be spun out soon as a public company again.

Read Intel’s MobilEye Levels Up To Take On Tesla And Others In Self-Driving

And watch the video:

You may also want to watch Intel's own videos explaining their approach.

Comments

The Bosch and VW/Cariad partnership for ADAS and AV announced today fails to mention Mobileye. Does Volkswagen commit to Mobileye to gather REM Roadbook data towards the end of this decade?

One would think the Mobileye REM Roadbook contract is not year to year but rather a 3 or 5 year agreement.

The new BMW partnership with Qualcomm/Arriver and the new Volkswagen partnership with Bosch could limit resources to any current or renewable BMW and Volkswagen contracts with Mobileye in this decade.

1
we are acquiring the IP and capabilities to design our own software. And we are forming a world-class team with Bosch to join forces with our own software engineers who’ve been working on developing VW’s proprietary 2.0 software stack. Congrats to all who’ve made this happen!
2
the alliance nicely complements last year’s Hella Aglaia camera software acquisition and what we’re doing in the AD space with argoai and the ID BUZZ robotaxi.
3
in the end, it’ll be a game of vertical integration: From sensors to the latest and most precise road data, software and AI training loops for adequate perception and the compute power to take the right decisions in very diverse traffic situations worldwide.

vw use bosch in next year 2023 car
bosch work with vw for year

Your reference to early 2022 was poorly researched.

You author in May 2020 the intended date of a Robotaxi launch in Israel in early 2022. But legislation to allow Robotaxis only achieves draft form as of Dec 2021 (Reuters Dec 7). To imply a tecnological slowdown for the timeline implimentation is not substantiated. Mobileye then went on to add Munich to Robotaxi rollout because of acceleration in legislation in Germany in September 2021 for a mid 2022 rollout.

Israel eyes 400 self-driving electric taxis,

Is the CEO of Mobileye truly informing the public that a current 1000 hour MBTF for camera vision based automated driving system will improve to 10,000 hour MBTF by Q4 of 2023 when UDELV intends to have vehicles on the road with vision, lidar and radar. A 10x improvement in 21 months?

I believe he is predicting a 1,000 hour MTBF for his camera based system, and that makes a 10,000 hour value for the camera/lidar/radar system more attainable. I would easily believe that, and have a harder time with the 1000 hour camera only system.

And yes, 10x improvement in 21 months is not unreasonable. Like many such technologies, improvement is on an exponential. Which can mean that if it took you 6 years to get to 99.9% from 9%, it might take just 6 more years to get to 99.9999% if you can keep up that exponential pace.

for specifics see PPT for ces 2020

see slide "Motivation Behind Surround CV", slide 10, from the CES 2020 Under the Hood of Mobileye’s
Computer Vision

straight forward slide

That's about driving in Tokyo. Do you mean another slide?

for the PDF download
1st slide reads CES 2020 Engines Powering L2 to L4

slide 10 labeled the Motivation
Behind Surround CV

pdf on intc dot com under news > presentation dated jan 7 2020
title Mobileye CES 2020 Presentation – Prof. Amnon Shashu

But yes, he is predicting 10,000 hour MTBF for the vision only system, that is true. Back then he predicted it for 2022, and obviously that's not true. This is not particularly surprising.

I don't think the figure of 10,000 hours between injuries is correct for humans, I put it closer to 20,000. For fatalities it's around 2 million hours (he says his numbers are approximate, and so are mine but not off by factor of 2.)

He thinks they will see 1,000 hours this year, so we'll see how it does. But since that's vision only when he adds the LIDAR and radar (particularly the ones coming in 2025) I could see that boosting things a fair bit.

In your interview Mobileye says will see *many times* 1,000 hours this year

Does Zeekr SuperVision launch require a certain MTBF threshold internally at Mobileye?

1000 hr MTBF at approximately 37.5 miles per hour average yields 37,500 miles.

Zeekr goes live with Mobileye SuperVision L2+ in first half of 2022.

Shashua states improvement in 2022 to "way above over 1000 hours" MTBF.

Sandbagging sounds more plausible than tarnishing the premier rollout of SuperVision with Zeekr.

zeekr autopilot is not called supervision

No he says "way above" which to my mind would could mean as little as 1,200 to 1,500 hours. But we'll see how he does.

statistics NHTSA links

Reddit article - "Mobileye CEO on the rate of failures for humans vs. autonomous vehicles" - has links to NHTSA stats. Posted by strangecosmos 2 yrs ago under r/SelfDrivingCars

Waymo's fleet of AVs (690 max) drove 2.3 million miles in California between December 1, 2020 and November 30, 2021. "Waymo finished 2021 with 690 AVs in CA"

CA had a total of 1,397 DMV-approved vehicles in Dec 2021.

Cruise AV fleet stayed about 200 in CA in 2021, with 210 by end of year.

Still have found one news item about sdk for EyeQ in last 60 days with the exception of comment made by Ford.

meant Still have NOT found

No indication found yet that supports VW Group vehicles built upon the SSP platform architecture will incorporate Mobileye technology.

Also Interesting that Bosch and VW started collecting fleet road data in an alliance in 2021 and never mentions Mobileye. This collected data parallels the data Mobileye collects for REM yet no reference to Mobileye.

This recent news of both the VW and BMW change of development partnerships for ADAS for future platform architectures would make for a good case study.

The German OEMs have had, correctly, a fear that the software components (particularly driving system) of a car will become the most important part of the car. Not the engine or luxury or even their brand. That is a nightmare for them, unless they can own that system. They fear a world where Waymo dominates, but they are not keen on a world where MobilEye or Intel dominates either.

Ownership of IP is not exactly a new concern in the evolution of a software-defined vehicle.

If the conceptual flow of the core competencies of AV driving systems followd this general framework:
Perception > Forecasting/Prediction >
Planning/Policy > Control
then the core objective of the OEM is to be entirely responsible for the behaviorial planning?

For a long time. But previously, software and computing were not in control. ECUs and code are things a car OEM buys in putting together a car today. In the future, they are the car, and the maker of the software controls what the car is.

Did Aptiv acquisition of Wind River occur to late in the movement to software defined car cycle?

Too late for German OEMs to neuter Waymo.

here coming Foxconn

Samsung now building new central compute chip for Waymo. Amusing
Volkswagen wanted to take silicon IP in house but Bosch will force CUDA into Cariad stack. So much for owning silicon IP as well.

ARM'S SOAFEE could sway Cariad.

Complete malarkey to deny there does not exist an underground stream of inside knowledge about future plans in the AV industry given as much as the engineering talent jumps around. Loose lips is not a phenomenon but human nature. Give me a break. The Qualcomm automotive plans were well advanced by 2019. VW caught few by suprise with Bosch partnership. Silicon Valley does not move as fast as claimed when dealing with verticals. The list is endless.

simulator like Waymo, Cruise and Tesla.

mobileye loses adas business from major oem accounts for new ev platform architectures ....

going public on the exchanges only glosses over this loss of future business that intel cannot remedy

what is current mobileye moral ?

Who cares????
VW & BMW just reduced Mobileye status to a minor player in 6 months.

make car got zoox

did any information provided in the investor day presentation from yesterday from the mobileye ceo surprise you?

Intel Announces That Mobileye Has Submitted S1 Draft Registration Statement

SEC S1 registration review is between 90 to 150 days.

Expect little news from Mobileye in the interim due to the quiet period.

Linkedin description from SVP of AV Group at Mobileye

Navigate-on-Pilot NOP
Remote Smart Parking Assist RSPA Remote Parking Assist RPA
Automated Parking Assist APA
full self-driving L3/L4/L5

Mobileye update from today

3 OEMs wins for SuperVision in Q2 2022

REM now covers 90% of all roads in Europe and US

First half 2022 design wins generating 37 million units of projected future business

Mobileye Q2 2022 revenue of $460 million up 41% YoY, outperforming the rate of increase of global automotive production, which was relatively flat year over year

3 new OEM wins for SuperVision in Q2 2022

Since Geelys Zeeker was a previously announced OEM win for SuperVision, the three new OEMs is worthy of an official unveiling down the pike.

BTW, Mobileye got the regulatory approval to collect road test data in China, as indicated by CEO statement several days ago.

Amnon Shashua states
Next OTA will be with full-HD maps powered by REM (Mobileye's crowd-sourced HD-map building technology) offering point-to-point navigation. This is the beginning of a new era of premium ADAS. Eventually, we'll see this in the rest of the world.

best guess for 3 new supervision oem
Ford, SAIC, Nissan

Mobileye announced that it has successfully completed a 2,000+ kilometer proof-of-concept expedition for Mobileye SuperVision with a major European OEM on all road types, including night-time driving in several urban centers, utilizing only our 360-degree camera system, RSS-supported driving policy, and the existing

As of the end of last quarter, we had collected 8.6 billion miles of road data from, based on our estimates, approximately 1.5 million REM-enabled vehicles worldwide, and were analyzing up to 43 million miles of road data per day, with the size of the REM-enabled fleet increasing daily. The scale of REM becomes clear when compared to manually generated high-definition road maps from competitors that currently cover 1-5% of US roads.

Mobileye covers 90% of US.

source: Mobileye news section on corporate website from today

Mobileye seperately announces a Supervision PoC with major European OEM after announcing 3 OEM wins for SuperVision in Intel Q2 earnings slide deck, in the same week.

That would bring to total the 5th OEM with a model incorporating Supervision.

New blog article on Mobileye blog today
2,000 Kilometers, Six Countries, Four Days

Boeing joins the ELISA Project as a Premier Member to Strengthen its Commitment to Safety-Critical Applications.

seldom discussed is the strategy driving the Moovit integration into Mobileye.

The 2 presentations about the MaaS stack

1) Mobileye. D.R.I.V.E.S Israel, Nov. 5, 2019 Inaugural Investor Relations Summit pdf

2) EVP, Products & Strategy Strategy Session-MaaS Erez Dagan pdf

explain superficially the $900 million check for Moovit.

Nissan may have jumped Mobileye REM ship to Dynamic Map Platform. An April 2022 DMP news release references Nissan use of DMP HD Map tech for the Nissan electric crossover SUV Ariya.

Another next generation EV platform jumping ship similar to BMW (to Qualcomm and HERE) and VW (to Bosch and TomTom) would not be good news for Mobileye if true.

Ford, Geely and SAIC may be the only remaining top tier OEMs using REM Roadbook in the future for new platforms.

Today finds a twitter post by CTO of Mobileye Shai Shalev-Shwartz with a twist.

Look closely at display screen.

Another strange post today - Along with the other tweets all in the last week.

Mobileye CTO FLOC talk yesterday posted and still concerned
with simulators.

Amnon Shashua at Hammers & Nails 2022
last night at Weizmann Institute

After Dinner Talk: The State of AI: Opportunities and Dangers

Talking about Simulators per
Kyle Cranmer on Twitter @KyleCranmer

First tend: the importance of simulators. Amnon Shashua

old news as Nissan used the Dynamic Map Platform companys map data back in 2019 for the Nissan Skyline model.

New GM Super Cruise expansion has many caveats and Forbes has a good beginners read on subject.

Some of those 37 million EyeQ units were Toyota.

Toyota’s first China-made BEV bZ4X starts presale on April 29, 2022

Toyota's e-TNGA platform, the bZ4X is the first model of the bZ full-electric vehicle series.

The model will be armed with the third-generation Toyota Safety Sense system that offers Level 2 driver assistance functions. Other intelligent features include the Mobileye EyeQ4 autonomous driving chip, front-facing monocular camera, 12 ultrasonic and millimeter-wave radars.

TSS 3.0 is Mobileye.

2023 Toyota Crown has TSS 3.0

Marklines Glenn Sanders review ...
Toyota’s first true battery-electric vehicle brings some of the best driver-assistance features we have tested so far.

Mobileye office in Mülheim-Kärlich on the outskirts of Koblenz where ZF Active Safety Division is located is noticably hiring staff.

Mobileye is looking for a hardware functional safety engineer to join our Platform HW Development and Industrialization group in the design of the next generation of an automated driving control unit.

This position is based at our Mülheim-Kärlich office in Germany.

ZF ProAI with Nvidia silicon versus ZF solutions with Mobileye silicon will be an interesting competition to watch.

How much attention will ZF give Eyeq5 or EyeQ6 or EyeQ Ultra?

ZF ProAI with Nvidia silicon versus ZF solutions with Mobileye silicon will be an interesting competition to watch.

How much attention will ZF give Eyeq5 or EyeQ6 or EyeQ Ultra?

As of July 2022 specific safety technologies will become mandatory in all new model types of European vehicles.

The new EU requirement stipulates intelligent speed assistance ISA, lane-keeping assistance LKA, advanced emergency braking AEB, and Driver Monitoring System DMS for cars, and blind spot detection for buses and trucks.

GM and Stellantis fitment rates for the above were some of the lowest in the EU at the end of 2021.

Is The Information report about the Apple Titan car project reference to tests without relying on highly detailed, three-dimensional road maps accurate?

Does the Apple choice of AV maps over HD maps influence the robo industry?

However, it rings true, because the report says that the decision to not use maps (for similar reasons to Tesla) is what has held the project up.

It's silly to avoid maps while trying to get your project to work. Driving while forgetting all prior drives is something to do later on when you are better.

A new Amazon AWS and Mobileye video on YT How to Process Data from 70 Million Cars Driving Around the World, reflects a different perspective.

Mobileye is reportedly in merger talks

That hardly makes a lot of sense. They are part of Intel, and while "old" ME is run fairly independently they are deeply tied with Intel now for chip design/fab, lidar, and imaging radar. They did plan to go public but put it on hold due to the market, and yes, they want a way to exploit the success of ME while Intel has stagnated, but it's not easy to see how they would be spun out to be merged into another company. I've never really heard of a division of a mega-giant "merging" with somebody. But it's not out of the question that somebody could buy ME from Intel, keeping the hardware relationship in place.

Not many could afford it though, the value would be very high. Apple could afford it of course, but Apple doesn't buy businesses, it buys tech.

Apple special project hires in 12 months for purported Titan project.

Today, there is a report that Luigi Taraborrelli, a 20-year veteran of Lamborghini, joined Apple.

Apple just hired Ford veteran Desi Ujkashevic in May.

Last year, Apple hired Ulrich Kranz.

Last year, Apple hired Dr. Manfred Harrer.

Last year, Apple hired Dr. Anton Uselmann.

Last year, Apple hired Christopher CJ Moore and Stuart Bowers.

If Apple special project Titan headcount is above 500, there surely is outsiders who know what is going on, including the Chinese.

Apple is one of the best companies at keeping secrets, even with Chinese companies making their hardware.

Apple buys IP aka technology, and talent.

I believe Michio Kaku said radar and GPS would be the basis of the driverless car and V2X would be the conduit for scalability.

Time and space.

The Turn of Moore’s Law from Space to Time - written by Liming Xiu
Book review by Daniel Nenni on 07-29-2022 on Semiwiki

This book is worthy of a read.

What will be a future fundamental paradigm shift for the autonomous vehicle?

someone has to pay for the new headquarters

this is the Director of AI Engineering and previous Chief AI Architect ???

youtube Mar 3 2022
Ohad Shitrit Mobileye - AI Engineering - Challenges in large scale ML development

July 27 2022 Times of Israel

Apple picks Jerusalem for new development center in Israel.

Johny Srouji, senior vice president of hardware technologies at Apple, was responsible for setting up the first two Israeli Research and Development centers where Apple now employs about 2,000 people.

Apple reportedly will establish a campus site at Hebrew University of Jerusalem per HUJI twitter feed.

The primary location of the new Apple Jerusalem development center is reported to be near or on the Givat Ram HUJI Safra campus.

Amnon Shashua comments and answers at CES several years ago about autonomous trucking not making sense especially for Mobileye and the industry is a moment few remember. Four years later it is quite different in the industry.

CEO of Mobileye on Twitter

Just a few weeks ago, we completed a multi-day, transcontinental road trip that put Mobileye SuperVision – our next-generation driver-assist system – to the test. It made extensive use of the Mobileye Roadbook, our AV map fueled by REM which provided the vehicle with a wealth of information about what to expect in its driving environment. The success of this latest test paves the road for the adoption of Mobileye SuperVision in additional vehicles, and we can’t wait to share what we have planned next.

MoovitAV is about to launch.
September say the intelligentsia.

source please

possible as EU regulations set in place now

Schaeffler's first IAA Hanover presence

www dot schaeffler dot com/en/media/dates-events/kolloquium/digital-conference-book-2022/rolling-chassis/

strange comment by ceo - can't wait to share what we have planned next.

A PoC in the USA for the media?

Brads favorite pet peeve - proof is in the ride

Herbert Diess Linkedin post in May
All of below in single thread by HD.
-----

picture together of
Herbert Diess (VW), Tal Babaioff (Mobileye), Nakul Duggal (Qualcomm)

I visited Amnon Shashua (we share also the passion for motorbikes) and our former colleague Johann Jungwirth in Israel in February. The autonomous driving experience itself was very, very impressive. The L2++ camera only system manages the really complicated traffic in Israel, we drove for 45 minutes without any intervention – so it makes sense for us to implement Mobileye also in our next generation of software. ...

.... I had a great meeting two weeks ago in San Diego with Qualcomm-CEO Cristiano R. Amon and their Automotive Chief Nakul Duggal to align on our cooperation. The chips of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Ride portfolio will be used in all Group vehicles with the unified CARIAD Software generation starting in the middle of the decade.

Important: That doesn’t mean that we stop to work with Intel – the opposite is going to be reality: We want to expand our very successful partnership with Mobileye, are already in talks. In the current ID.-vehicles the customers can already benefit from their great technology with the travel assist based on swarm data. And for the next generation of our software used by AUDI AG & Porsche AG we want to have Mobileye stronger implemented to enable the cars for convenient and reliable level 2 ++ automated driving.

Linkedin thread by HDiess
herbertdiess_trinity-software-activity

Tal Babaioff left Mobileye?
ORCA AI says ex-Mobileye

(was Vice President of Mapping and Localization and the co-GM of REM)

the exodus begins?

minor re-org by July ? and Intel EyeC groups and IP merge into Mobileye in April ? Both REM group co-GMs make changes.

AV Group now defined as (SuperVision, Chauffeur, Drive, MaaS)

wrong - that is Cristiano Amon, not a Tal Babaioff

CTO
Congrats to FSD team for the great progress! Our Supervision system shares the camera-centric approach, but differs in some key elements. 1) Crowd-based HD map vs. SD map 2) Math-based vs. simulation-based driving policy 3) Multiple redundant systems vs. a single one.

Humans drive better when they are familiar with the road ahead. Furthermore, it is better to solve problems offline than to solve them online. Offline has more compute, knowledge of the future, optimal weather conditions, and the ability to validate quality.

With REM maps, we adjust driving style to the crowd behavior at each geographical region. This is a key aspect in generalizing our system to so many different places.

Our driving policy approach is unique. In a nutshell, we specify transparent assumptions on the behavior of other road users, and then calculate analytically the worst-case. That is, we use math formulas instead of simulating many possible futures.

For details on driving policy see:
youtube.com
Mobileye's Lean Driving Policy by CTO Prof. Shai Shalev-Shwartz

Tesla's perception system is based on one big "hydranet". It is a great solution. But, it is one great solution. There are many other great solutions. We believe in redundancy. Every piece of our system is solved by more than one approach.

We use e2e deep networks as well as decomposable methods, and even good old computer vision. Every single solution will suffer from diminishing returns at some point. Multiple redundant approaches can cover for each others.

Company today on Twitter
At Mobileye, we believe there’s more than one way to solve a problem. Our AV's robust sensing system utilizes three different tech engines: 1. Our legacy computervision backbone 2. Pixel-level segmentation 3. Vidar (visual detection and ranging).

SVP Johann Jungwirth

I am driving the Zeekr 001 every day, just returned from a 2.5 hour trip to the Dead Sea, experiencing already the next software release with the hands-free pilot in action - with driver monitoring ensuring eyes-on the road - driving me from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea and back, touching the steering wheel partially only about once every half an hour. Just amazing, can’t wait for the next over-the-air update offering the same driving experience to all customers.

We are already in the final validation stage of hands-off driving (eyes-on with driver monitoring) for the next major OTA release, offering the full AV driving experience in REM-mapped areas, in many parts of the world it means virtually everywhere and also parking assistance. I am personally experiencing it every day in the Zeek 001 and other vehicle platforms and it’s such a joy to let the car do the supervised driving.

45,000 L2++ SuperVision on roads by end of year

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