How Mobileye persuaded Porsche to go hands-free

However, five months is a long time in the fast-paced world of automotive software. Hilgenberg is now out amid a Cariad reshuffle and Mobileye is once again in favour, having being allowed to announce the Porsche win (car makers often don’t disclose supplier names).

From this point, Mobileye believes that it can score more VW wins with Supervision, which uses 11 cameras, the latest EyeQ5 chip and Mobileye’s intelligence to deliver level-two-plus autonomy (so hands-off but not eyes-off driving). 

“It's not just Porsche. This opens the door to much broader volumes in the entire [VW] Group,” Shashua said. “A success like this really means, I believe, a very, very long-term relationship, because the system is so complex and the performance is so high that once it's in the car, you don't go and replace it by some other supplier.”

Shashua’s confidence and the fears of Cariad’s former boss come from the same place: Mobileye has built a formidable ADAS business with level of knowledge that might be unsurpassed in this game, so much so that car companies looking to vertically integrate that knowledge themselves might be too late.

Mobileye was founded by Shashua in 1999, when he was a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, off the back of his research into a vision system to detect vehicles using only a camera and software algorithms on a processor. 

Mobileye’s first EyeQ1 product combined a camera and radar for Volvo in 2007 for adaptive cruise control, but by the EyeQ2 of 2010, the radar was dumped for just a camera in a pedestrian-detecting automatic emergency braking system for Volvo and a front collision warning system for General Motors and BMW.

The genius in creating sophisticated ADAS from a camera and chip costing “tens of dollars” (Shashua’s words on his company’s first quarter earnings call) means Mobileye now has 70% of the global ADAS market, according to estimates from Evercore ISI, a bank, in a report published in November.

Mobileye itself says it does business with 50 car makers across “hundreds” of models and shipped 34 million chip-and-camera systems last year. 

But Mobileye’s truly clever trick has been to harvest data from the more recent EyeQ camera-and-chip combos to create a crowd-sourced high-definition map called Road Experience Management (REM), that crowd being cars built by its customers, including the VW Group. What this means is that millions of cars are building up Mobileye’s knowledge of not just road networks but also how drivers are using them.

Cariad’s former CEO belatedly realised that Mobileye was gaining knowledge that VW itself could be using for its own competitive advantage on semi-autonomous driving. (Shashua takes a different view and says VW has a perfect right to download all the same information. “There's nothing to prevent Volkswagen taking this data and building whatever they like to build,” he told Autocar.)

VW is already using that so-called ‘swarm data’ generated by REM to improve the intelligence of its assisted driving systems, for example placing cars within lanes more naturally. A high-definition map created in the traditional way by lidar could position you correctly for a right turn across oncoming traffic. “But it will be a theoretical point," said Shahua. "On the other hand, REM knows where humans are yielding."

It's not only cheaper than high-definition maps, it’s also much more frequently updated. Mobileye claims it could map the entirety of Israel in 24 hours just from data sent over the air from VWs and cars from nine other vehicle makers sending back REM data.

With this knowledge, Mobileye created Supervision. Launched on Geely's Zeekr 001 (an EV that's coming to Europe this year), Supervision is also coming to the Polestar 3 and Polestar 4 (pictured below). There’s another Geely brand signed up, too. By 2026, six car makers and nine brands will be using Supervision, Shashua told Autocar.

This is what gets bank analysts excited. Last year, Mobileye’s revenue was $1.9 billion (£1.5bn), up from $1.4bn (£1.1bn) the year before. But from the “tens of dollars” that Mobileye makes from the relatively simple chip-and-camera combo now, Supervision jacks that up to $1000-$2000 per vehicle, estimates Evercore. Sign up someone like Toyota and that’s $4bn (£3.2bn) revenue from one manufacturer alone, Evercore calculated. 

Shashua said the hardware cost is still pretty small, with the gains coming in software. Evercore reckons that will translate to 50% margins. 

Supervision is the next step to full autonomous driving. Shashua is targeting 2026/2027 for eyes-off operations for Mobileye's Chauffeur product, which adds radar and lidar to the 360deg camera of Supervision. He said in April that two car companies are testing Chauffeur.

Mobileye meanwhile is hoping that it can reverse VW’s decision to change suppliers with new management at Cariad. “Volkswagen is one of our biggest customers," Shashua said. "The deal with Qualcomm... Let's hold our breath and see what happens in 2028, 2029."