Mobileye Bullish on Full Automation, but Pooh-Poohs Deep-Learning AI for Robocars

Mobileye, the Israeli car automation company that came onto the self-driving car scene as sort of an anti-Google, is now looking at the future in terms that seem a bit closer to Google's than used to be the case. Speaking Friday at a conference organized by Goldman Sachs (which owned a chunk of Mobileye's shares when the company first became publicly traded in 2014), Amnon Shashua, Mobileye's founder and chief technical officer, placed a lot of emphasis on mapping, something Google has done all along. And now Shashua is predicting utterly hands-free driving--if only on the highway--by 2021. Mobileye had always emphasized incremental steps, such as active cruise control and emergency braking, collectively called advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). It was Google that proposed to skip all half measures and get right to full-bore self-driving cars.