Autonomous driving is in the front seat as one of the biggest tech narratives taking hold of the auto industry. After pedestrian accidents involving General Motors' (GM) robotaxi service Cruise, self-driving innovators like Mobileye (MBLY) remain dedicated to implementing safety features while sharpening their infrastructure.
Mobileye CEO and President Amnon Shashua sits down with Yahoo Finance's Akiko Fujita at CES 2024 (Consumer Electronics Show) to discuss Mobileye's aim to scale and broaden its driving systems for automakers. Shashua breaks down the narratives behind autonomous driving into three points: safety, rider productivity, and converting self-driving vehicles into major resources.
"Mobileye is active in all three stories," Shashua says, underlining the prominence of safety concerns in self-driving dialogues. "You want a system that observes 360 degrees everything around you, and has situational awareness of everything that happens around you. And then prevents you from making a mistake, prevents you from hitting a pedestrian, prevents you from if another car is getting closer to you, your car will offset."
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AKIKO FUJITA: I'm Akiko Fujita here on the ground in Las Vegas at CES 2024, where there's certainly been a lot of conversation about autonomous driving. We are joined by Professor Amnon Shashua. He is the president and CEO of Mobileye, right in the center of that conversation. It's great to have you here today.
AMNON SHASHUA: Great to be here.
AKIKO FUJITA: You've had a string of announcements here on the ground, one of those being the driving experience platform, the DXP. You've kind of described it as a type of operating system--
AMNON SHASHUA: That's right.
AKIKO FUJITA: --for a car like Polestar. How does it work?
AMNON SHASHUA: So Mobileye is a supplier. We're talking about very complex systems that involve multiple cameras, about 11 cameras, imaging radars, lidars, very heavy compute. So it's a big chunk of the car. And the carmaker, naturally, wants to control important aspects of the driving experience, not treat it as a black box. On the other hand, for Mobileye, customizing a system per customer would be difficult for scaling.
So we found a way in which we can build a system, basically, build only the infrastructure of the system, which is one that fits all and allow the carmaker to write code on top of our system to control the driving experience.
So I'll give you an example. We divided the world into what is universal and what is unique. So for example, controlling the car is unique. HMI is unique to the carmaker. Perception, on the other hand, is universal. There is no reason that a BMW or an Audi or a Hyundai will have different perception engines because the role of perception is to understand the environment, and you need to understand the environment to a certain accuracy that will enable autonomous driving. So there is no differentiation there.
But then comes the driving policy. Driving policy is all the code that is related for decisionmaking of the car, when to change lane, how to change lane, how to negotiate with other road users, the braking profile that you use. All of this controls the driving experience. Driving policy contains a lot, a lot of AI, a lot of validation, a lot of data driven processes. And customizing this per carmaker would be a nightmare.
So what we found out is that we can take the driving policy and separate it into the universal and unique. The universal part is what we code. This is the operating system. And the unique part is what the carmaker codes on top of our universal infrastructure, and in that way, create a system that can scale to all carmakers.
AKIKO FUJITA: So allowing the brands to customize according to their brand. There's certainly been a lot of negative headlines that have played out here in the US around autonomous driving, the biggest one being GM's Cruise. They've had to halt all operations after the incidents that have happened in San Francisco. I realize Mobileye is not involved in that. But I'm curious what the conversation has been with some of your clients. Has this given them some pause in terms of how they integrate this technology in their cars?
AMNON SHASHUA: I think the story of the autonomous driving, there are three stories there. One story is safety. Another story is buying back your time. Say your traffic today is congested. You sit quite a long time in the car. You'd like to do something else while you are going from point A to point B in your car-- now, use your smartphone, for example, or read a book, so buying back your time. The third story is using the car as a resource, so like an Uber, like a ride hailing. So the story of Cruise and Waymo is only the third story, the story of using the car as a resource.
Mobileye is active on all three stories. So for example, safety, for safety, you don't need hands-free. For safety, you want a system that observes 360-degree everything around you, understands all this, and has a situational awareness of everything that happens around you, and then prevents you from making a mistake, prevents you from hitting a pedestrian, prevents you from-- if another car is getting closer to you, your car will offset. If you are getting close to a car with an open door, your car will offset. If there is an obstacle, your car will do kind of a evasive maneuver. So this raises the safety levels to a very, very significant degrees. Once you have the safety, you can start allowing the driver to have hands off. So this is the second story of buying back your time.
AKIKO FUJITA: But when you talk about-- you don't necessarily need to be hands-free in order for safety. Is that where you think the real use cases is going to be in this technology? I mean, so much of the attention has been about level 5 autonomy.
AMNON SHASHUA: That's right. But because they focused only on the third story. The first two stories have significant value proposition. The safety story is a very significant value proposition because you save lives, the second story of buying back your time.
So if you have an eyes-off system in a consumer car, we are driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and 90% of the time you are on highways. And on a highway, the system allows you to give control to the car. And legally, you'll be able to do something else because it's an eyes-off system. This is a significant value proposition because time is important, right? Because we want to do something else while you're driving.
The third story is about using the car as a resource. This is the Waymo and Cruise story. And I think that the public is aware only of the third story. It's not aware of the first two stories that are very significant in terms of their value proposition.
AKIKO FUJITA: So if that third story has gotten a lot of the attention, has been that the first chapter, let's say, in autonomous driving, how does a platform like supervision for Mobileye, how does that get you to the next story? What are we talking about here?
AMNON SHASHUA: So the supervision is the first story and half of the second story. It is a system that has 360-degree situational awareness. It has 11 cameras around the car, so it understands everything around you. And can provide a layer of safety. It provides a layer of safety way beyond any driving assist systems that exist today. It also provides you a hands-free experience, provided that you are alert, that you are supervising the system.
AKIKO FUJITA: How do you ensure that?
AMNON SHASHUA: So there is a driving monitoring camera watching you. And if your gaze is on the road, the system will allow you to drive hands-free. Otherwise, the system insists that you hold the steering wheel, right? So it's not the second story of buying back your time because you are supervising the system, but the driving becomes much more relaxed because the car is driving itself. But really, the biggest story there is safety.
The step up beyond supervision, which we call Chauffeur, Is adding a few more sensors for redundancy, like a lidar or imaging radar. And then you define certain road types or certain conditions, say, for example, highway driving, where you can then legally have eyes off. That's the second story, and that's also coming out in about 2026. Those are the announcements that we made with the western OEM. Nine car models are going to be equipped with the Chauffeur system by 2026. Polestar is going to be equipped with Chauffeur system in 2026. FAW, a number of models in FAW of China will be equipped with that. So this is really the next step coming out.
AKIKO FUJITA: Very quickly here, a macro question, because you are in touch with the biggest carmakers that are out there. Are you seeing a bit of a pullback in terms of the investments that they're making in the technology side of autos, just given where things have been? Or are you finding that they are still accelerating some of those investments because where the market is going?
AMNON SHASHUA: Yeah, I think it's the opposite. If you look at the gross margin of a car, especially in electric cars, it's very difficult to get a good gross margin. What is really the moneymaker in the car is the intelligent driving, the fact that you can provide safety, you can provide buy back your time with a chauffeur system, hands-free driving. Those are measured in many thousands of dollars and increase the gross margin of the car.
So the carmakers will compete on the level of intelligent driving that the car has because, from an engine point of view, the chassis point of view, the differentiation is becoming more and more problematic, right? It is really the intelligent driving, the HMI, the driving experience. What are you providing the driver beyond the basics of an engine and a chassis? This is where the big money is coming. So I think the opposite is happening. Carmakers are investing even more in this area.
AKIKO FUJITA: Yeah, it's been fascinating to have these conversations here on the ground about where the car experience is going. Professor Amnon Shashua, president and CEO of Mobileye, thanks so much for joining us.
