Mobileye Raises $400 Million for Cheaper Self-Driving Car Tech

Self-driving cars that allow drivers to take their hands and minds completely off the road won't come cheap if they go on sale in the next decade or two. But a Dutch and Israeli company called Mobileye envisions its relatively inexpensive driver assistance technology becoming widespread by 2016. Mobileye has raised $400 million to back its development of semi-autonomous driving technology in partnership with automakers such as General Motors, BMW, and Volvo. The company, valued at $1.5 billion, aims to deploy technology that can take over for drivers during stop-and-go traffic or handle long stretches of highway driving--features that won't cost nearly as much as Google's famous self-driving cars, according to the New York Times: "In some ways, the goal is not dissimilar to the already famous Google driverless cars, though the search giant's systems allow for completely hands-off driving. But Mobileye is aiming to get most of the functionality into cars for much less, with fewer cameras and computer equipment that cost hundreds of dollars, rather than the tens of thousand of dollars that Google's array of sensors is estimated to cost at the moment."