Intel’s Mobileye signs a contract to supply eight million cars

Mobileye has signed a contract to provide eight million cars at a European automaker with its self-driving technologies, a company official stated.

Mobileye is a Intel Corp’s Israel-based autonomous driving unit.

Commercial terms of the contract and the identity of the automaker were not revealed.

The deal, one of the largest yet for Mobileye, is a sign of how automakers and providers are speeding up the introduction of features that automate certain driving tasks – like highway driving and emergency braking – to generate income while technology to allow fully automated driving in all conditions is still years far from mass-market deployment.

The deal for the advanced driver assisted systems will start in 2021, when Intel’s EyeQ5 chip, which is styled for fully autonomous driving, is released as an upgrade to the EyeQ4 that will be presented in the coming weeks, stated Erez Dagan, senior vice president for sophisticated development and strategy at Mobileye.

Intel and Mobileye are rivaling with several rival chip and machine vision system manufacturers, consisting Nvidia Corp., to deliver the brains and eyes of automated vehicles.

The future system will be available on a range of the automaker’s car models that will have partial automation – where the vehicle is automatically driven but the driver must stay focused – as well as models integrating a more advanced system of conditional automation.

Mobileye, purchased by Intel last year for $15.3 billion, states there are some 27 million cars on the road from 25 automakers that utilize some sort of driver assistance system and Mobileye has a market share of over 70 percent.