Intel plans to test a fleet of fully autonomous vehicles by the end of the year after completing its acquisition of key player Mobileye.
The technology company said Mobileye, now an Intel company, will start building a fleet of level 4 SAE vehicles for testing in the United States, Israel and Europe.
The first vehicles will be deployed later this year, and the fleet will eventually scale to more than 100 cars.
Amnon Shashua, who is due to become senior vice president of Intel Corporation and CEO/CTO of Mobileye, said: ‘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.
‘Geographic diversity is very important as different regions have very diverse driving styles as well as different road conditions and signage. 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.’
Intel said combining the two firms would allow Mobileye’s leading computer vision expertise – ‘the eyes’ – to complement its own computing and connectivity expertise – ‘the brains’ – to create automated driving solutions ‘from cloud to car’.
Mr Shashua said: ‘Neither company could do this alone. Given resident skill sets within the two companies, a standalone fleet of test vehicles is
possible almost immediately.’ Intel said it will also showcase ‘novel concepts of mapping and safety validation, which are both geared toward scalability’.
Mr Shashua added: ‘Our customers will benefit from our ability to use this fleet to accelerate our technology development. We want to enable automakers to deliver driverless cars faster while reducing costs – data we collect will save our customers significant costs.’
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