Almost every new energy brand in the early days of its establishment is inseparable from the Israeli Mobileye company, this company is at the forefront of the world in the development of monocular vision-based ADAS functions, so companies that have been listed like Tesla, Weilai and Ideal have invariably chosen to cooperate with Mobileye in the early stage of development, and the driving assistance functions that these companies initially promoted were actually from Mobileye's hands.
It was split and listed by Intel
In 2021, the company did not have as smooth a ride as expected, although as early as 2017 it was acquired by Intel for a high price of $15.3 billion, but four years later, its EyeQ chip still has not landed in Intel's own production line, or mainly in A FOUNDries such as TSMC.
Due to the lack of deep integration with the parent company, on December 7 this year, Intel announced that it would spin off Mobileye and go public, and the estimated valuation given by the market may exceed $50 billion. Although this valuation is enough to satisfy investors compared to Intel's purchase price that year, it also means that in the development of autonomous driving chips, Intel's cash is not enough to give Mobileye a blood transfusion, so it has to hand over the future of the Israeli company to the capital market again.
The computing power of the chip falls behind the person
Mobileye's market share of ADAS before 2019 once exceeded 90%, which can be said to have an absolute dominance. But with the later announcement of giants such as Nvidia, Qualcomm and Huawei, Mobileye's chip computing power has obviously fallen behind in the industry, and the latest generation of 7nm process EyeQ5 chip has a single hash rate of only 24TOPS, compared with Nvidia's Orin chip single computing power has reached 200TOPS, directly more than a digit.
To know that the current new energy vehicle market has entered the same as the mobile phone than the parameters, than the hardware stage, every new car conference, attracting attention is the size, endurance, computing power and other parameters, these characteristics are also the brand in the promotion of the big book. Mobileye obviously can't meet this fiercely competitive market, so the OEMs represented by "Wei Xiaoli" have turned around and begun to move away from Mobileye.
Sales strategy is closed
Lidar technology is just getting started
In addition to the fall of computing power, Mobileye's strategy of being too closed is also not accepted by car companies, because it is mainly provided by solutions packaged with chips and perception algorithms when cooperating with car companies. That is to say, when its driving assistance function is working, car companies cannot get the core data or modify the algorithm according to the characteristics of their models. This strategy makes car companies very passive in cooperation, and the experience of automatic driving is difficult to develop in depth for domestic use scenarios.
And Mobileye is a company that specializes in visual perception algorithms, and although Intel announced in January this year that it will merge its own lidar and radar development teams into Mobileye, they will have to wait until 2025 for the real mass production of lidar technology to go public. This year, in order to achieve higher level and more advanced automatic driving functions, many car companies have installed lidar on their own models, and it is clear that the market will not wait for Mobileye.
Due to the above three reasons, Mobileye is no longer favored in the new energy market, but traditional fuel vehicles have begun to open their arms to it. In 2019, Great Wall said that it will integrate the L0 to L2+ driver assistance system based on Mobileye technology into its models, and the Haval Big Dog, the third-generation Haval H6 and the tank 300 are its representative models. Toyota Motor Corporation also announced in May this year that it will cooperate with Mobileye and ZF to develop ADAS systems for future new cars.
Behind this, on the one hand, because the fuel vehicle for the automatic driving function is not so high pursuit, as long as it can meet the basic requirements can meet consumers, on the other hand, Mobileye adheres to the monocular camera visual perception algorithm in the hardware cost has a great advantage, I believe that the future in the future within 200,000 fuel vehicles, will be further promoted.
Uncle Che summed up
In the past few years, the market's excessive publicity for automatic driving has obviously been a bit aggressive, but fortunately, this phenomenon has obviously changed in 2021, and various new energy brands have gradually not taken it as the primary selling point of their models. This kind of environment is obviously not a big blow to mobileye, the head supplier, so its technology is slowly precipitating down to the fuel vehicle market within 200,000, for this era of rapid change, it is difficult to predict whether it will dominate again in the future, but obviously, this year it is not very good.