Tesla is dumping Mobileye???

[Sir Guacamolaf]

This tells me that eventually Tesla's autopilot will be about as good as their media and phone integration is today.

 

[J1mbo]

Maybe explains why the MX and facelift MS only got one camara when they were clearly intended to have at least 2.

They probably would want to concentrate on software and integration rather than building a new AP hardware platform inhouse.

I am guessing that the simpliest option would be to move to Bosch for the camera suite and either Nvida or Qualcomm for the DNN (self-driving).

 

[voyager]

Tesla and Mobileye parted their ways three months ago, before Intel-BMW-MBLY announcement:

Why would a partnership with Intel and BMW be a deal breaker to Musk anyway?

 

[Matias]

Let's hope this doesn't delay AP 2.0.

 

[Tam]

Tesla has a large deposits for Model ≡.

For Mobileye, that's a loss of 400,000 chips in a near future.

The loss is even more staggering as Tesla plans to produce 500,000 in 2018 and 1 million vehicles annually starting 2020.

But something is worth much more than money--reputation:

Mobileye NV (MBLY) Stock Tumbles As Partnership With Tesla Motors Inc (TSLA) Ends

"Without directly citing the recent fatal accident, he suggested reputation concerns about safety of the company’s technology, clearly referring to the crash which took place while the autonomous driving technology was activated."

As mentioned by @tentonine, Mobileye is not the only company, Nvidia is a good alternative too.

How Our Deep Learning Tech Taught a Car to Drive | NVIDIA Blog

 

[shokunin]

Not surprising, especially when the mobileye roadmap was hinting to 2017-2018 for EyeQ4 chipset. Buying someone else's autonomous driving hardware and chip processing only gives you a small differentiator.

I'd rather see them license google's autonomous driving tech, even if that means giving in to LIDAR.

I guess it's highly unlikely to retrofit AP1 to AP2.

 

[zambono]

This tells me that eventually Tesla's autopilot will be about as good as their media and phone integration is today.

I had the same thought

 

[anticitizen13.7]

Another possibility is that Tesla could use NVIDIA's Drive PX instead.

Drive PX is more of a general purpose computing solution than Mobileye's EyeQ series, which are ASICs tailored to run Mobileye's algoritms. In terms of overall power consumption and performance per watt, I'm not sure that Drive PX is better than Mobileye.

Tesla has a large deposits for Model ≡.

For Mobileye, that's a loss of 400,000 chips in a near future.

The loss is even more staggering as Tesla plans to produce 500,000 in 2018 and 1 million vehicles annually starting 2020.

But something is worth much more than money--reputation:

Mobileye NV (MBLY) Stock Tumbles As Partnership With Tesla Motors Inc (TSLA) Ends

"Without directly citing the recent fatal accident, he suggested reputation concerns about safety of the company’s technology, clearly referring to the crash which took place while the autonomous driving technology was activated."

As mentioned by @tentonine, Mobileye is not the only company, Nvidia is a good alternative too.

How Our Deep Learning Tech Taught a Car to Drive | NVIDIA Blog

I remember from other news articles that Mobileye had expressed reservations about how quickly Tesla was advancing the Autopilot system in its cars. I got the impression that Mobileye's leadership viewed Tesla's actions as risky.

While Mobileye's EyeQ visual processing unit is just one component of Autopilot (front radar, surround sonar, are from other suppliers, and Tesla has to write the software to tie everything together), I can understand how the general public might conflate Mobileye with Autopilot.

 

[RDoc]

This tells me that eventually Tesla's autopilot will be about as good as their media and phone integration is today.

You didn't mention their Most Excellent implementation of the Navigation system!

If Tesla is going to rely on their in-house software expertise, I'd suggest everyone get used to the current Beta and plan on their kids using it as well. Grandchildren might be another story if you're still young.

 

[shokunin]

Mobileye is making it sound like they ended the partnership. Possible that Elon was forcing their roadmap to improve and enhance the Q3 platform since EyeQ4 is still a year+ out and mobileye didn't want to invest in an aging platform.

 

[Fallenone]

Drive PX is more of a general purpose computing solution than Mobileye's EyeQ series, which are ASICs tailored to run Mobileye's algoritms. In terms of overall power consumption and performance per watt, I'm not sure that Drive PX is better than Mobileye.




I remember from other news articles that Mobileye had expressed reservations about how quickly Tesla was advancing the Autopilot system in its cars. I got the impression that Mobileye's leadership viewed Tesla's actions as risky.

While Mobileye's EyeQ visual processing unit is just one component of Autopilot (front radar, surround sonar, are from other suppliers, and Tesla has to write the software to tie everything together), I can understand how the general public might conflate Mobileye with Autopilot.

Power consumption and performance per watt may be issues for ICE with limited electric power to support these, but not an issue for EVs.

Also I agree MBLY is worried about the pace of TSLA's progression in autonomous driving. At least this is the main reason they claimed in today's statement ("our reputation").

 

[brkaus]

I would guess nvidia. They already have them in the center display, don't they?. Of course, that hasn't been updated recently either.

 

[jhm]

Mobileye's technology was not going to be able to detect lateral transvers movements of vehicles until 2018. This was the sort of movement in the recent fatality. Tesla took all the heat, but the Mobileye's technology was not up to the task. So I wonder if this has something to do with the break up.

 

[ecarfan]

Bringing it in house makes sense. Seeing as AP technology is so central to Tesla's brand and vision, I can see them wanting to have great control over direction and pace of the technology's evolution, plus, there are cost benefits to bringing it in house.

Agreed. Elon has been clear that autonomous driving capability is central to his vision of an EV future. He has authorized hiring a large engineering group just to work on AP and the person in charge of that group reports directly to Elon.

It is a big blow for Mobileye.

 

[Johan]

Elon on CC:

"One of the challenges we face is that for a lot of supply chains they're impedance-matched to the timeframe of the big OEMS, and Tesla just moves a lot faster than the big OEMS. And so, if they're impedance-matched to a typical sort of 6-year development cycle and we're on a 2- or 3-year development cycle, it just doesn't connect properly. Some suppliers can handle that, and some can't."

Mobileye couldn't deliver the next gen chip in time, so Tesla cut them out. It's that simple.

 

[Vitold]

Why would a partnership with Intel and BMW be a deal breaker to Musk anyway?

It's other way around - BMW would probably not like Tesla getting the latest tech. MBLY needed a partner after Tesla's departure, BMW needed autonomous tech and Intel to get "foot in the door".

I think the alliance is positive for MBLY and puts pressure on Tesla, however, just like MBLY-Tesla, MBLY-Intel are temporary allies.

 

[dixonpete]

I have to think this is a big thing. All the AI that's been developed, isn't it dependent on the Mobil-Eye hardware?

 

[Stoneymonster]

I have to think this is a big thing. All the AI that's been developed, isn't it dependent on the Mobil-Eye hardware?

Probably not, if they've done it right.

 

[andrewket]

This isn't a surprise. Tesla already uses their own software on top of mobil-eye's hardware when other manufacturers are using their software. Tesla sees AP as critical to their success, and clearly likes to in-house critical dependencies.

I'm still bullish on Mobil-eye, though.

 

[malcolm]

Key AP employees were appointed by Elon and he keeps very close tabs on its development.

Fair to say that he has little patience for any perceived bottlenecks and/or suppliers who may move at a different speed.