Tesla Motors announce future factory

“Mobileye’s work with Tesla will not extend beyond the EyeQ3. We will continue to support and maintain the current Tesla Autopilot product lines. 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,” Amnon Shashua, co-founder, chairman and chief technology officer of Mobileye, said during the company’s earnings call Tuesday.

Responding to the announcement, Tesla said it was “transitioning to internally developed software for the camera portion of Autopilot.”

Its CEO Elon Musk, however, linked the move to Mobileye’s recently announced partnership with BMW and Intel for self-driving cars. “Mobileye’s ability to evolve its technology is unfortunately negatively affected by having to support hundreds of models from legacy auto companies. This was expected and will not have any material effect on our plans,” Musk reportedly said in an emailed statement.

The Israeli chipmaker, however, seemed more concerned about its reputation, an issue that may have aggravated after the recent accidents involving Tesla vehicles and the ongoing investigations into the company by U.S. federal authorities.

Shashua said that in the company’s view, “moving forward to 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.”

Himanshu Goenka