The leader of Intel Corp-owned Mobileye on Tuesday laid out plans for any self-driving car system for 2025 that could use house-built lidar sensors rather than units from Luminar Technologies Inc and cost a “few thousand” dollars.
Luminar shares fell as much as 9% after Reuters reported the move. The organization didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mobileye is making rapid progress toward a full autonomous driving system using cameras and a custom-made processor chip, however the company intends to augment its cameras with lidar and radar sensors that will capture a three-dimensional look at the road. Mobileye believes it can satisfy the safety and reliability requirements automakers are demanding for production vehicles by combining the two approaches.
Mobileye has deals to provide its current camera-based driver assistance systems to BMW, Volkswagen AG and Nissan Motor Co. Those systems assist with tasks such as adaptive cruise control and lane-keeping, but also generate and transmit mapping data for Mobileye because they drive.
Amnon Shashua, CEO of Mobileye as well as an Intel senior v . p ., told Reuters that data allowed the company’s test vehicle to autonomously navigate the streets of Munich with simply a week of setup and without flying any engineers from Mobileye headquarters in Israel to Germany.
“This is a critical milestone – this is what you'll need for scalability. If you want to have a system at the consumer level, it has to be able to drive everywhere,” he told Reuters after the company posted footage from the successful test, which used a human safety driver as a backup.
Mobileye intends to demonstrate its camera-based systems with safety drivers in several more cities before rolling out a test fleet of 100 completely driverless vehicles augmented with lidar and radar in Tel Aviv in 2022.
In November, Mobileye said it had selected Luminar to provide lidar units starting in 2022. Luminar began trading as a public company earlier this month after a merger with Gores Metropoulos Inc, a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.
Shashua said the Luminar-based systems will cost between $10,000 and $20,000 and will be targeted at robo-taxis, which are commercial vehicles that may spread the price of the system over many trips. But for 2025, Mobileye is developing its own lidar sensor that actually works on a principle called frequency modulated continuous wave, or FMCW, that is different from Luminar’s technology.
Shashua said the FMCW technology may benefit from Intel’s silicon photonics manufacturing expertise and can drive costs low enough for consumer cars. He explained the house-built Mobileye lidar, in combination with cameras and radar, is going to be used on consumer vehicles and may also replace Luminar’s units in Mobileye-powered robo-taxis.
“We believe to buy a entire self-driving system can be within the few thousand dollar range, which leads us into a consumer vehicle position,” he explained. “If we can make this work, it will likewise be used for robotaxis. But we've time for you to choose to 5 years from today.”
Mobileye does intend to continue outsourcing the manufacturing of its processors, Shashua said. He said the next generation of chip, called the EyeQ6 and likely to get to 2023, will continue to be made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s using its 7-nanometer chipmaking process.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in Bay area; Additional reporting by Munsif Vengattil; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
