Mobileye: Redundancy, Mapping, Safety

At this month’s virtual 2021 Consumer Electronics Show, Mobileye presented a lot. CEO Amnon Shashua sat for a friendly interview with Ed Niedermeyer, and Shashua also gave a standalone hour-long presentation about Mobileye’s technology.

Shashua highlighted three areas of differentiation that provide competitive advantages for Mobileye:

• Redundancy
• Mapping
• Safety

Redundancy

The plan seems to be that Mobileye will build a camera-only driver assistance system, and then layer radar and lidar on top to get to Level 4 autonomy by 2025.

Mapping

Mobileye has worked to identify minimal amounts of high-valuable semantic mapping data that it can collect from each customer vehicle. Shashua says that uploading this data back to Mobileye costs about $1 per vehicle per year.

Safety

Several years ago Mobileye published RSS: Responsibility-Sensitive Safety. This is Mobileye’s approach to safety. Shashua views this framework as a key advantage for Mobileye. I confess I don’t understand how this approach compares to other efforts to validate AV safety.

I’m not sure how much to believe in the power of these advantages. But Mobileye is the world’s premier ADAS vendor and in the past I’ve found Mobileye a bit hard to learn about. So it’s a step forward to even get a sense of how they view their own advantages.