Last week’s release of financial results by autonomous driving pioneer Mobileye cast a revealing light on the state of autonomous driving technologies.
Since its founding in 1999, Mobileye has pioneered such groundbreaking technologies as True Redundancy sensing, and Responsibility Sensitive Safety, which are driving the advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) industry. To date, approximately 170-million vehicles worldwide have been fitted with Mobileye technology. In 2017 the company was acquired by Intel in a $15.3-billion deal, and in 2022 was listed as an independent company on Nasdaq.
For the three months to the end of March 2024, the company reported revenue of $239-million, a decrease of 48% compared to the first quarter of 2023, due to a 58% decrease in revenue related to the EyeQ sensor system on a chip. The drop, said Mobileeye, was “primarily attributable to the usage of meaningful inventory at our Tier 1 customers to satisfy demand”.
In other words, customers were using up what they had already ordered previously, suggesting an inventory build-up, which may be a sign of slowing demand.
The good news was a major deal with the Volkswagen Group, which made a wide-ranging production award for SuperVision, Chauffeur, and Drive products, a potential multi-billion-dollar deal.
“Overall, we are seeing a solidified consensus view among many OEMs, including mainstream brands, that a SuperVision-type feature set is critical to being competitive over the medium and long-term in a software-defined, recurring revenue world,” the company said in its results statement. “As well as that Mobileye’s SuperVision technology supports an optimised balance of performance and cost while providing a scalable platform to pursue Level 3 eyes-off and beyond.”
Level 3 is part of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) definition of 6 levels of driving automation, ranging from 0 (fully manual) to 5 (fully autonomous). The results announcement came in the same week that Mercedes-Benz sold its first Level 3 licensed vehicle in the United States. However, the fall in revenue suggests there are still many roadbumps ahead for autonomous driving systems developers.