I don’t know about the Tesla-haters here, but over on the paid side of TMF, some of the Tesla-haters there invested in Mobileye.
They’ve been hurting, and I believe are in for even more hurt. But, not because of Tesla, but because of Nvidia.
I’m sure by now everyone here as heard of or seen the Mercedes CLA “L2++” demo drives. YouTuber “Everyday Chris” has one you can look up if you haven’t. The system in the Mercedes is based on Nvidia’s AGX Thor/Alpamayo hardware/software. Maturity-wise, I’d say it’s around FSD V13.0 functionality - better in some ways, worse in others. Mercedes says the CLA will ship with L2++ later this year.
Lucid says the Gravity will have it, too, in a year or so, as well as the upcoming Earth model when it launches. Other OEMs from Volvo to Xiaomi are all claiming to have upcoming vehicles based on the Nvidia hardware + open-source software, and a number of Tier1s have jumped on the bandwagon as well.
Mercedes just announced that they’re bring an “L4 ready” version of the system to the S-Class:
Nuro is planning an L4 version, with hardware tacked onto a Lucid Gravity, for sometime in the next year, as a robotaxi.
This is exactly where Mobileye has wanted to be for years. Mobileye is a pretty big player in the ADAS space - that’s the warnings and such you get from non-autonomous cars, some of which are mandated by FMVSS today. But, Mobileye has always had big ambitions to have L3 and L4 driving not just for robotaxis, but for privately owned vehicles. Their progress has been slow, and their promises, like Tesla’s, unfulfilled. What’s ironic is that when Tesla went E2E AI, Mobileye released a blog post saying it wouldn’t work. It appears at the same time Nvidia engineers went down a similar path to Tesla’s.
And while SFSD (Supervised FSD) has been moving along nicely lately, it appears the first real competitor for L2++ is not Mobileye, not SuperCruise, not BlueCruise – but Nvidia. For a while now, it has looked like Tesla was as ahead in autonomy today as they were in EVs back in 2012, but Nvidia has saved the day for many OEMs. I’d estimate Tesla has an 18-36 month head start on Nvidia, we’ll see if I’m right or wrong and who moves more quickly from there.
But Mobileye, I believe, is in trouble. They may survive with their ADAS systems being sold into OEMs for their low-end vehicles, but Nvidia just ate their lunch and dinner. It also means that OEMs have another viable option besides dealing with Musk, so Tesla, as usual, will have to go it alone. Good job, Elon.