Intel is famous for a lot of things, making autonomous vehicles is not one of them. Sure they've partnered with many car manufacturers like BMW and such in the past but in those cases their capacity was limited that of a chip company. This time things are different.
On Wednesday last week Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced that Intel will be undertaking a project starting this year to manufacture a fleet of 100 autonomous cars to test self driving technology. The tests will be carried out in the US, Israel and parts of Europe. On the same topic, Intel said they will be spending north of $250 million over the next two years on the development of self-driving technology. Which isn't a huge sum considering that they themselves predicted that the autonomous car market will come to be worth $7 trillion.
 |
| Intel CEO, Brian Krzanich | Getty images |
Not long before the announcement, Intel had just finalized
the $15 billion acquisition of Mobileye, an Israeli software company who's CEO
and incoming Intel vice president had this to say, "Building cars and
testing them in real-world conditions provides immediate feedback and will
accelerate delivery of technologies and solutions for highly and fully
autonomous vehicles....... our goal is to develop autonomous vehicle technology
that can be deployed anywhere, which means we need to test and train the
vehicles in varying locations."
Mobileye is known for supplying software that enables Advanced Driver Assist Systems (ADAS) to car manufacturers. The software makes use of an artificial vision sensor to help avoid obstacles when driving, something that will obviously be crtical for Intel's project to succeed.
The autonomous cars that the Chip company intends to produce will be level four autonomous. Level four autonomous cars are those that are largely self driving except for the few instances where human intervention Will be required. Next to level 4, Level 5 autonomy is the highest rating for self-driving cars which is somewhat theoretical because it implies that a car can drive through any and all conditions with no need for a human fallback.
Though just an emerging market, competition in the autonomous car industry is already very stiff. An independent study by Navigant in April this year ranked the top autonomous car manufacturers and the results were jaw dropping. Ford come out in first place followed by General motors. Waymo was in seventh while Tesla and Uber didn't even crack the top ten.
These are uncharted Waters for Intel and clearly they have their work cut out for them especially with so much high-profile competition. Nevertheless they seem to be making all the right moves most notably the acquisition Mobileye, which is certain to serve them well in the future.
EmoticonEmoticon