Intel Mobileye unit to build fleet of 100 level 4 self-driving cars

Intel completed its tender offer of Mobileye and immediately announced plans to accelerate the unit's self-driving car technology business. Later this year, Intel will start rolling out a fleet of fully autonomous (level 4 SAE) vehicles in the US, Israel and Europe to test self-driving car tech in real world scenarios. Eventually the fleet will scale to over 100 vehicles.

With the completion of the tender offer of Mobileye, Intel is poised to accelerate its autonomous driving business from car-to-cloud. Mobileye, an Intel Company, will start building a fleet of fully autonomous (level 4 SAE) vehicles for testing in the United States, Israel and Europe. The first vehicles will be deployed later this year, and the fleet will eventually scale to more than 100 automobiles.

"Building cars and testing them in real-world conditions provides immediate feedback and will accelerate delivery of technologies and solutions for highly and fully autonomous vehicles," said Amnon Shashua, soon-to-be senior vice president of Intel Corporation and future CEO/CTO of Mobileye. "Geographic diversity is very important as different regions have very diverse driving styles as well as different road conditions and signage. Our goal is to develop autonomous vehicle technology that can be deployed anywhere, which means we need to test and train the vehicles in varying locations."

Building these test vehicles, Intel's new entity will combine proprietary capabilities from Mobileye including computer vision, sensing, fusion, mapping and driving policy along with Intel's leading open compute platforms and expertise in data center and 5G communication technologies to deliver a complete "car-to-cloud" system.

The fleet will include multiple car brands and vehicle types to demonstrate the technology's agnostic nature.

"Delivering 100 test cars very quickly will demonstrate how this hybrid system can be adapted to meet customer needs," Shashua said. "Neither company could do this alone. Given resident skill-sets within the two companies, a standalone fleet of test vehicles is possible almost immediately."

The test fleet will allow the hybrid solution based on Mobileye and Intel technology to be demonstrated to current and prospective customers in a real-world landscape, and also serve as a base to interact directly with regulators. It will also showcase novel concepts of mapping and safety validation, which are both geared toward scalability.

"This does not replace any customer activities; it is additive to them," Shashua said. "Our customers will benefit from our ability to use this fleet to accelerate our technology development. We want to enable automakers to deliver driverless cars faster while reducing costs – data we collect will save our customers significant costs."