EVwire brief: Mobileye is moving beyond selling self-driving technology and into owning and operating a robotaxi service of its own.
The vertically integrated business will launch in a major US city in 2027, starting with about 100 fully driverless vehicles and scaling to roughly 17,000 over the following five years.
Mobileye says the move adds to, rather than replaces, its core business of supplying its Mobileye Drive system to automakers and mobility providers. The two programs are meant to run in parallel.
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“Mobileye has spent more than two decades building the technologies required for autonomous driving. Today we are taking the next step: combining those technologies with operational ownership to create a financially and geographically scalable robotaxi business designed from the ground up for global deployment.”
Mobileye Drive is integrated into partners’ vehicle programs so far
Mobileye Drive is the company's self-driving system, today integrated into partners' vehicle programs rather than run by Mobileye itself. More than 230 million vehicles worldwide have been built with some form of Mobileye technology inside.
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The new plan stretches Mobileye across the entire robotaxi value chain. It pairs Mobileye Drive with the consumer apps, multimodal trip planning, fleet management, AV mission control and teleoperation tools of Moovit, the mobility-app subsidiary Mobileye owns.
Moovit's platform reaches more than 1.7 billion users across over 3,500 cities, which Mobileye casts as the consumer layer for an autonomous service.
Mobileye plans to phase in roughly 100 vehicles across the year
The 2027 launch is meant to start small and prove the model. Mobileye plans to phase in roughly 100 vehicles across the year to validate operations under fully driverless conditions, then scale to about 17,000 vehicles over the following five years, working with vehicle-platform makers, fleet operators and integration partners to fill out the stack.
Shashua framed the strategy as a response to a robotaxi market that today leans on a small number of dominant operators. “As interest in autonomous mobility accelerates, the industry has become increasingly dependent on a small number of technology providers and business models. We believe there is an opportunity for a new approach,” Shashua said.
Source: Mobileye press release
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