Tesla is dumping Mobileye???

[Darren F]

Woah!

 

[Mo City]

That would be my guess. I think it is clear that Elon recognizes just how important autonomous driving is. He has authorized hiring a big team to make it happen, and the head of that team reports directly to him. He wants Tesla to have an autonomous system that is second to none. It would be advantageous if Tesla totally controlled such a system and did not have to rely on outside sources for hardware or software.

I doubt that Mobileye's decided to end its relationship with Tesla. They are are valuable, high profile client. It is more plausible that Elon decided to end the relationship with Mobileye so that Tesla has full control and ownership of all aspects of Tesla's autonomous driving system when it becomes a reality, which Elon has stated he believes will be in two or three years (but regulatory approval will take longer).

OK, this seems to be the main thread for the subject.

Agreed it is very unlikely the vendor (Mobileye) ended this relationship and it is quite possible Mobileye's agreement with Intel & BMW resulted from Tesla's decision to move on.

Obviously Elon Musk will have something to say about this very soon. Curious how much he reveals.

We now know why he mentioned AP on current Tesla's will be improved going forward.

 

[Vitold]

OK, this seems to be the main thread for the subject.

Agreed it is very unlikely the vendor (Mobileye) ended this relationship and it is quite possible Mobileye's agreement with Intel & BMW resulted from Tesla's decision to move on.

Obviously Elon Musk will have something to say about this very soon. Curious how much he reveals.

We now know why he mentioned AP on current Tesla's will be improved going forward.

Tesla and Mobileye parted their ways three months ago, before Intel-BMW-MBLY announcement:
Mobileye NV (MBLY) Dips on Rumors of Losing Tesla Motors Inc as Client

Also, there would be no point for EM traveling to MBLY HQ recently to demonstrate their tech if MBLY/MBW wanted Tesla out.

 

[JohnSnowNW]

I don't know enough about this to form an opinion...but I'd kinda like to hear what Tesla is doing instead.

 

[xkwizit]

Actionable Trading Ideas, Real Time News, Financial Insight | Benzinga

 

[Shawn Snider]

Sounds like BMW and Intel payed em off lol

 

[SabrToothSqrl]

Yes, they did. It's so sad. I wonder who gets the dog. And the CD collection. Are CDs still a thing?

 

[brkaus]

Well, really not sure what that means for my future model s. Maybe time to just lease, although my preference is to drive cars 15 years.

 

[Vitold]

Well, really not sure what that means for my future model s. Maybe time to just lease, although my preference is to drive cars 15 years.

If anything, "Tesla doing it alone", moves likely-hood of Tesla AP 2.0 to a later time.

 

[ivengo]

Thinking about it I think it is a good thing, because Tesla will have control of more components from scratch so they can provide tighter integration and more superior final solution. They hired a person who worked in AMD on processor manufacturing and it means that they started panning to bring everything in house some time ago.

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

With Musk's recent tweet about changing how the Autopilot sees and MobilEye's hook-up with BMW and IBM, I think that both companies could be looking in different directions.

 

[omarsultan]

Bringing it in house makes sense. Seeing as AP technology is so central to Tesla's brand and vision, I can see them wanting to have great control over direction and pace of the technology's evolution, plus, there are cost benefits to bringing it in house. I wonder if there is a MobieEye competitor out there that Tesla is eying for an acquisition.

UPDATE:
Reading the article, it sounds like maybe the MobilEye technology did not make the cut for AP 2.0

 

[Cosmacelf]

Wow, this is almost insane. Mobileye has very sophisticated chips that run complex neural network algorithms to understand what the camera is seeing. Tesla must now source (or build, gulp) chips from someone else and develop equivalent neural networks to recognize cars, paths, people, etc. Tesla did hire a microprocessor design guru less than a year ago. I sure hope Tesla's engineers aren't doing what engineers normally do, look over someone else's work and say "Pshh, that's so trivial, I could build that in a weekend".

By bringing AutoPilot hardware and software completely in house, I fear this will delay the introduction of AP 2.0 by quite a bit.

 

[anon]

Another possibility is that Tesla could use NVIDIA's Drive PX instead.

 

[brkaus]

If anything, "Tesla doing it alone", moves likely-hood of Tesla AP 2.0 to a later time.

Agree...

 

[Gizmotoy]

Back in May there were some articles that said MobileEye was telling customers not to expect EyeQ4 until 2018. Engineering samples of EyeQ5 are expected at around the same time. Knowing Musk, it's likely he decided Tesla can do it faster. Or perhaps more specifically, that they must do it faster to get them into Model 3.

So I suspect we'll be waiting a bit for a substantial AP upgrade.

Considering that MBLY said they need one year to come-up with a solution for detecting cross traffic it may have rubbed Musk a wrong way as well.

Cross-traffic is hard to do with forward and rear-facing cameras. There's a reason many of the existing implementations use corner-mounted radar units (some also fuse data from the radar with wide angle camera data to determine object type). The ultrasonics Tesla chose for proximity detection are particularly bad for cross traffic, so they must either fit new hardware (radar) or rely solely on the camera.

It's not an impossibility, but it is a hard problem. I don't know how wide the front camera is, but the rear is nowhere near as wide as that on some other vehicles that use the rear camera for cross traffic detection.

 

[Dynastar]

Tesla hired Jim Keller, a microprocessor engineer, six months ago which is well before the autopilot fatality. I think Tesla has been planing on going it alone for some time, and this is a very SpaceX-ish move by them. Elon has said before that SpaceX commonly outsources parts for their rockets while developing the same part in-house. Once the in-house part has shown that it is as capable as the outsourced one SpaceX switches to it. This is one of the big reasons SpaceX is able to thump the competition when it comes to costs and features.

 

[xav-]

Time to short Mobileye? The stock is super pricy..

 

[privater]

I believe their CEO's stupidity is the reason: they openly blame on Tesla autopilot after the crash to promote their future product. That backstabbing made Tesla embarrassing and cut the loose in quick. Now tesla might fully cooperate with Nvidia, they have better hardware design and long relationship with Tesla plus it's easy to work with someone in close distance.
Ps: Nvidia CEO have a good relationship with Elon in person.

 

[brkaus]

Having a cpu guy for 6 months doesn't get them a solution they can put in a car, probably not even in time for the 3.