Tesla Dumps Chipmaker Who Designed Its Autopilot System | TechTree.com

Tesla Dumps Chipmaker Who Designed Its Autopilot System

Fatal crash of the company’s Model-S in Florida has reportedly caused the parting of ways

 

Barely weeks after the fatal car crash involving Tesla’s Model S autopilot, the US-based carmaker has announced that it was parting ways with the company that designed the image recognition hardware that powered the car’s semi-automatic driving systems.

A report published in Recode (read it here) quoted Ammon Sashua, the CEO of Mobileye, to suggest that the company would continue to support Tesla’s current products but would prefer to directly work with manufacturers rather than providing an OEM solution.

Sashua made the following announcement while announcing the company’s second quarter financial results… “We continue to support and maintain the current Tesla autopilot product plans. This includes a significant upgrade of several functions that affect both the ability to respond to crash avoidance and to optimize auto-steering in the near term, without any hardware updates.”

“Nevertheless, in our view, moving toward more advanced autonomy is a paradigm shift both in terms of function complexity and the need to ensure an extremely high level of safety. There is much at stake here, to Mobileye’s reputation and to the industry at large. Mobileye believes that achieving this objective requires partnerships that go beyond the typical OEM / supplier relationship, such as our recently announced collaboration with BMW and Intel. Mobileye will continue to pursue similar such relationships,” the statement said.

In a related development, a report published in Engadget.com (read it here) quoted Tesla CEO Elon Musk as saying that the parting of ways between the two companies was “somewhat inevitable. There was nothing unexpected from our standpoint.”

So, what would the future hold for Tesla? According to DIY self-driving expert George Hotz, the system that Mobileye was making is quite easy to reproduce and most probably Elon Musk and his team would start building their own version of the it soon.

Hotz was quoted by Recode to suggest that Tesla could well have the talent already available at its headquarters in Palo Alto. It may be recalled that the company had hired former AMD chip engineer Jim Keller to lead Autopilot’s hardware engineering team. 


TAGS: Tesla, Mobileye, Autopilot, Ammon Sashua

 
News Corner
IMP IMP IMP
##