Although the Israeli company is considered public, the bulk of its shares are still owned by Intel, and since the parent corporation is experiencing financial difficulties, the subsidiary also has to find ways to save money. Mobileye said it was abandoning plans to develop its own lidar and would cut about 100 employees as a result.
Image Source: Mobileye
Based on the results of this year, operating expenses for the development of lidars should be $60 million, so combined with small personnel losses, Mobileye will not save much on this decision, but it is not dictated only by financial considerations, as Reuters adds. Firstly, the quality of image recognition by machine vision systems based on the latest EyeQ6 chip is very impressive to Mobileye management, and therefore it is wiser to rely on this technology for further development. Secondly, competitors have been more successful in developing their lidar technologies, and therefore Mobileye’s solutions simply cannot compete with them on price.
Let us remember that lidar means an optical sensor that at high speed forms a digital “cloud of points” that describes the surrounding environment, from which the size of objects and the distance to them can be determined with high accuracy. In dynamic mode, lidars make it possible to recognize objects and their outlines even in conditions of limited visibility, since they usually use the infrared spectrum. Mobileye has been developing frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) lidars. Failure to create them will not affect the plans of Mobileye customers, and will not have a significant impact on the company’s business this year. The company plans to wind down the division’s operating activities by the end of this year.