Skip to main content

From Paris to NYC, Mobileye will bring self-driving cars to metropolises

A self-driving vehicle from Mobileye's autonomous test fleet navigates the streets of Detroit. (Credit: Mobileye, an Intel Company)
Image used with permission by copyright holder

A Tesla in Autopilot mode can ply the highways of Northern California without issue, but when it comes to congested cities packed with erratic vehicle traffic, bikes, and pedestrians, cameras don’t always cut it. Or they didn’t, anyway. After years of testing, Intel-owned Mobileye intends to embrace the madness of the metropolis by rolling out self-driving cars in cities across the world.

On Monday, the first day of CES 2021, the company announced that Tokyo, Shanghai, Paris, Detroit, and New York City will all see fleets of Mobileye-powered vehicles rolled out in early 2021, if all goes well (regulatory issues are still being ironed out in NYC).

The key, says CEO Amnon Shashua, is technology that lets Mobileye map entire cities without an army of engineers on the ground. More than 1 million vehicles from six different carmakers are already sharing data with Mobileye, allowing the company to build high-definition maps of cities without needing a physical presence there. The company just proved this approach in Munich, where it successfully launched autonomous vehicles with just two weeks of testing and two employees in the city. Mobileye calls this technology Road Experience Management, or REM.

A complementary technology called Responsibility-Sensitive Safety, or RSS, will allow the vehicles to deal with unpredictable city drivers. “If we’re going to deploy an AV car amongst other human drivers, it needs to behave as a human would,” said Shashua. “Humans make assumptions. We replicated those assumptions in a mathematical way.” So while an autonomous car may know it has the right of way, it will still anticipate other drivers violating that right of way, and react accordingly.

In addition to its camera-based advances, Mobileye announced that it will be working with parent company Intel to develop chip-based lidar by 2025. That puts Intel in competition with many other companies racing to develop solid-state lidar, but Shashua insists that Intel’s existing silicon manufacturing facilities give it a leg up.

Editors' Recommendations

Nick Mokey
As Digital Trends’ Managing Editor, Nick Mokey oversees an editorial team delivering definitive reviews, enlightening…
An autonomous car in San Francisco got stuck in wet concrete
A Cruise autonomous car.

A self-driving car operated by General Motors-backed Cruise got stuck on Tuesday when it drove into a patch of wet concrete.

The incident happened in San Francisco and occurred just days after California's Public Utilities Commission made a landmark decision when it voted to allow autonomous-car companies Cruise and Waymo to expand their paid ridesharing services in the city to all hours of the day instead of just quieter periods.

Read more
Waymo taps the brakes on its autonomous-trucking project
A Waymo autonomous trick undergoing testing on a highway.

Six years after launching its autonomous-truck program, Waymo has said it’s decided to focus more on developing its ridesharing ambitions using its self-driving cars and minivans.

The California-based, Alphabet-owned company said its decision to effectively put autonomous trucking on the back burner is down to the “tremendous momentum and substantial commercial opportunity” that it’s seeing with the pilot ridesharing service it launched in Arizona in 2018 before taking it to several other states. Customers involved in the program can use an app to call a Waymo driverless car in the same way they would book an Uber.

Read more
Volkswagen is launching its own self-driving car testing program in the U.S.
Volkswagen self-driving ID. Buzz in Austin

Volkswagen is taking autonomous driving a little more seriously. While the likes of Tesla and Waymo have largely led the development of next-gen driving tech, the legacy automakers are certainly starting to invest more heavily. To that end, Volkswagen has announced its first autonomous driving program in the U.S.

As part of the program, Volkswagen has outfitted 10 all-electric ID. Buzz vans with autonomous driving tech, in partnership with autonomous car tech company MobileEye. Over the next few years, Volkswagen says it'll grow this fleet of autonomous cars to cover at least four additional cities, with the current fleet operating in Austin, Texas. By 2026, Volkswagen hopes to commercially launch autonomous cars in Austin.

Read more