Possibly the most significant automotive supplier win announced this year was Mobileye signing on Porsche for its Supervision hardware-and-software combination, which will allow hands-off driving from 2025.
You might wonder why. A posh assisted-driving system going to a premium manufacturer with annual sales of just over 300,000 is hardly earth-shattering news amid total global car sales of 66 million; and it’s only going into the Macan EV initially.
But its significance goes beyond mere numbers. “Supervision we think is a redefinition of premium,” Mobileye founder and CEO Amnon Shashua told Autocar in a recent interview.
Given what Mobileye has already achieved in the field of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and Porsche’s high status within the behemoth Volkswagen Group, this is potentially big.
The Intel-owned Israeli company is one of the trio of smart-chip companies, along with Qualcomm and Nvidia, that car makers are leaning on to deliver software-powered features that they believe will become the new differentiator.
Mobileye has been on the back foot in recent months as Qualcomm’s move into the ADAS led to it snagging business from its rival. First BMW announced it was switching to Qualcomm for assisted systems for cars on its 2025 Neue Klasse EV platform. Then in January, Volkswagen Group software division Cariad also announced that it was moving to Qualcomm for its next-generation SSP platform. Mobileye was seemingly out.
The reasons for VW ousting Mobileye on future models were noteworthy. Cariad boss Dirk Hilgenberg told journalists at the CES show in January that VW’s unhappiness with its Mobileye contract and its use of data harvested from the cars was a big motive for VW to create its own software division in the first place. “That's a contract the Volkswagen brand did prior to Cariad. That's why Cariad was founded, because we aren't having access,” he said.
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