At the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, which is held this week and has a large global influence, General Motors and Mobileye, an Intel subsidiary that will be listed at a valuation of $50 billion in the third quarter of this year, both said that driverless cars for consumers may appear in 2025.
GM said it is committed to launching a consumer-facing driverless passenger car "as soon as the middle of this century." Israel-based supplier of autonomous driving system Mobileye revealed that it is cooperating with Zeekr, a pure electric vehicle brand owned by Geely Automobile, to launch a car with four levels of autonomous driving capabilities in 2024, becoming the world's first consumer car.
Mobileye has also unveiled a "supercomputer" chip called "EyeQ Ultra", designed for the four-level autonomous driving capability of electric vehicles, this advanced high-performance system-on-chip (SoC) has low power consumption, ultra-fast processing speed, and can perform 176 trillion operations per second (TOPS), which is expected to be put into production by the end of 2023 and achieve vehicle-level mass production in 2025.
It is worth noting that the company's co-founder and CEO Amnon Shashua quoted the word "fully autonomous driving" in the mouth of Tesla head Musk to describe the four-level autonomous driving capability targeted by the above-mentioned high-performance chips, which is directly in line with Tesla's concept.
And, Mobileye's EyeQ Ultra chip is expected to cost "well below $1,000," which is much lower than the current price of selling self-driving systems to the auto industry, which automakers will theoretically use to power consumer-grade passenger cars, shared traffic and self-driving vehicles for delivery.
Mobileye has said that the combination of sensors and computing power required for autonomous driving would need to be "well below $5,000" to operate in the consumer market. At present, the self-driving system based on roof lidar sensors costs tens of thousands of dollars, mainly used in commercial-grade robotic driverless taxis, and the number of these vehicles that belong to the fourth level of autonomous driving on the road is still very small.
Unlike Tesla, Mobileye's development of a "fully autonomous driving" system relies on visual sensing technology composed of cameras, radar, and lidar sensors. Tesla abandoned radar sensors when it released FSD Beta 9.0 (fully automatic driver assistance system) last July, using a vision system that relies only on optical images.
Mobileye pointed out that consumer-grade (fully) autonomous vehicles (i.e. Autonomous vehicles, abbreviated as AV) are the ultimate goal of the automotive industry, and the company's advantage is that it can develop a complete set of autonomous driving solutions, covering hardware, software, high-definition maps and service models, to achieve dual optimization of the functions and costs of autonomous driving systems, so that the "ideal of consumer-level autonomous vehicles shines into reality".
Some analysts pointed out that as more and more traditional automakers march toward pure electrification, and the position of autonomous driving in the global blockbuster consumer electronics show is becoming more and more important, this shows a clear fact: no matter how the battle to enter the electric vehicle and autonomous driving technology is carried out, when the charge horn is sounded, driverless electric vehicles will no longer become the patent of a certain brand. Both General Motors and Mercedes are working with Intel rivals Qualcomm and Nvidia, respectively, to develop proprietary self-driving systems.
The Wall Street Journal also said that tesla-bullish investors often bet on the prospect of charging $10,000 for a fully autonomous driving kit to justify the company's trillion-dollar valuation. But that doesn't fit the reality of self-driving technology, which by any traditional measure is market leader mobileye, an industry vendor. Cheaper consumer-grade driverless system-chip will be mass-produced in a few years, which is bound to bring no small challenge to Tesla, and its high valuation may be impacted again.
Tesla's U.S. stock fell more than 2 percent after midday on Thursday, nearly giving back all of its gains since Dec. 31. Intel stopped falling and rose 0.1 percent, trading at its highest since mid-October 2021.
Intel acquired Israeli startup Mobileye in 2017 for $15.3 billion, which expects to go public at a valuation of about $50 billion in the second half of this year and generate $1.4 billion in revenue in 2021. After the subsidiary goes public, Intel will retain a majority stake in Mobileye.
