Exclusive: Intel's Mobileye gets self-driving tech deal for 8 million cars

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Mobileye, Intel Corp's Israel-based autonomous driving unit, has signed a contract to supply eight million cars at a European automaker with its self-driving technologies, a company official told Reuters. Financial terms of the deal and the identity of the automaker were not disclosed. The deal, one of the largest yet for Mobileye, is a sign of how carmakers and suppliers are accelerating the introduction of features that automate certain driving tasks – such as highway driving and emergency braking – to generate revenue while technology to enable fully automated driving in all conditions is still years away from mass-market deployment. The deal for the advanced driver assisted systems will begin in 2021, when Intel's EyeQ5 chip, which is designed for fully autonomous driving, is launched as an upgrade to the EyeQ4 that will be rolled out in the coming weeks, said Erez Dagan, senior vice president for advanced development and strategy at Mobileye. Intel and Mobileye are competing with several rival chip and machine vision system manufacturers, including Nvidia Corp., to provide the brains and eyes of automated cars.