Mobileye a division of Intel continues to push forward on autonomous driving technology
the company recently announced that they expect consumers to have access to these vehicles
within five years joining me to discuss all this and more is Jack Weast he's the Vice President of
Autonomous Vehicle Standards at Mobileye and Intel company so Jack when we saw you at CES last year
mobilized mapping strategy was the big buzz of the conference can you talk a little bit about how
that technology is advancing this year. Absolutely thanks Alexis it's great to see you virtually this
year so yeah we originally announced our mapping technology REM road book experience
management almost five years ago um and so what we're really uh sharing with the world today
is that the technology is real and it's being deployed globally across hundreds of thousands of
vehicles we are collecting millions of kilometers of mapping data on a daily basis uh from vehicles
and over a half a dozen manufacturers around the world and this gives us a significant advantage
in the sense of our ability to scale and deploy mobility as a service around the world COVID has
made development of automated vehicles challenging um and so we were able to recently send a car from
Israel to Germany where we don't have engineers and we couldn't fly engineers because of COVID and
because we'd already had Germany mapped because of our vehicles that we have driven by human drivers
with driver assistance in it that vehicle was able to get up and running in a matter of days
and so that ability to scale our deployments of our autonomous test vehicle fleets today
and the commercial deployments tomorrow is enabled by our unique crowdsource mapping technology
right and as you talked about this ability to scale is part of what differentiates you from
your competitors your company made the conscious decision to look at the camera first technology to
start with the hard technology can you talk about how that implementation of that business strategy
is working out for you. You know it's working out fantastic the traditional approach to mapping is
you have these really expensive Lidar based vehicles you have a small fleet of these you
send them out in months in advance to a city that you'd like to deploy in you send even more
expensive engineers out there with those vehicles and you drive them around and around and around
you would take big hard drives out ingest them into a data center it's incredibly
labor intensive and expensive to do that if that's what has to be done before you could deploy to a
new city or even expand the area of operations in a city you're already in that's not a way to
build a scalable business so we realized that we had a unique opportunity because we have a crowd
of tens of millions of humans driving driver assistance enabled vehicles today and so our
camera-based technology was mature enough that we can map the world with cameras we don't need
specialized lidar mapping vehicles and even better we can map the world with vehicles that you and
i are driving on a daily basis a tiny trickle of about a kilobyte per kilometer of data is all that
is needed to send up to the cloud to aggregate together information uh to to enable our av maps
you talked about your plans for scaling up so what cities are you planning on targeting next
yeah we are announcing this week that we are now operating in Detroit uh we hope to bring cars to
New York City we're going to bring cars to Tokyo to Shanghai to Paris uh we already have vehicles
operating in Munich as well as Israel uh and so i challenge the investor community to to look at any
other robo taxi vendor who has that many different vehicles operating in that many different
environments and think about how different the driving style is you know in all of those
different countries think about how different the signage is and the road infrastructure
and so our ability to operate simultaneously in these wildly different environments i think is
an excellent example of not only the strength of that map asset which allows us to put vehicles on
the road there in the first place but also the maturity of our vision algorithms which have
been matured over a decade in their deployment of driver assistance systems and cars all around the
world so we can already operate in Tokyo because we know what street signs look like in Tokyo we
can already operate in Germany because of the same so that ability to scale because of the
scale of our driver assistance systems provides an outstanding foundation for our ability to scale
a robo-taxi services in the future and it's so exciting as a consumer but also for investors
because i feel like you know every time we talk about autonomous vehicle technology it always
seems so far off but we're really looking at consumers possibly being able to use these
vehicles within the next few years can you talk a little bit about the importance with
partnerships or anything that you're looking at with with a Mobileye Intel yeah it's incredibly
exciting and so uh you know certainly consumers are going to have the opportunity to enjoy a robo
taxi experience say 2022. but we realized that you know in order for us to enjoy this technology
ourselves in a car that we could afford it needs to be affordable it needs to be in a
car that we can afford but also consumers have certain expectations when we buy a car we expect
that we can drive it anywhere and so when we buy a car with self-driving capability we should expect
it's going to be able to take us anywhere we could drive that vehicle ourselves uh and so in order to
accomplish those dual goals we need to not only bring down the cost of the self-driving system
but we also need to increase its capabilities because no longer would it be acceptable for us
to have a car that says no it will only operate in a self-driving mode in a geo-fenced area
you know that's not going to be acceptable to a consumer and so to achieve um this goal
uh we're announcing this week the investment and creation of a brand new kind of lidar chip
uh that Intel will be manufacturing in Intel's very unique fab that has the ability to to combine
active and passive lidar elements in a single SOC package we've also announced plans to create a
software-defined radar that will allow radar chips to work like cameras and do object detection and
classification with a radar chip alone and so this will allow us to reduce the cost of sensors
increase the capability of of the product and give consumers a vehicle that they can afford
that will be able to drive them anywhere that they would reasonably drive themselves
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