New eye on the road

One of the industry's hottest tech suppliers is blazing the autonomy trail by crowd-sourcing safe routes and using AI to learn to negotiate the road. Mobileye's co-founder and CTO explains.

Amnon Shashua, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Israel-based Mobileye, tells a story about when, in the year 2000, he first began approaching global carmakers with his vision-that cameras, processor chips and software-smarts could lead to affordable advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and eventually to self-driving cars.

“I would go around to meet OEM customers to try to push the idea that a monocular camera and chip could deliver what would be needed in a front-facing sensor-time-to-contact, warning against collision and so forth,” the soft-spoken computer scientist from Hebrew University of Jerusalem told Automotive Engineering during a recent interview. “But the industry thought that this was not possible.”