Porsche To Add Mobileye Driver Assistance To Future Cars

Sports car brand Porsche is to work with Mobileye to develop hands-free driving assistance and navigation features for future vehicles, the companies said on Tuesday.

The car firm said it would use Mobileye’s SuperVision platform as the basis for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

SuperVision uses an array of cameras and supporting radar to sense the surrounding environment and allows cars to follow navigation routes, autonomously change lanes and automatically overtake slower vehicles on multi-lane roads, according to Mobileye.

The Israel-based firm, which Intel acquired in 2017 and then spun out as a public company last October, says users can take their hands off the steering wheel on certain types of roads as long as they remain attentive and ready to take manual control.

Hands-free driving

The future systems are to be integrated and tuned by Porsche engineers, with the system that monitors the driver’s attention also being customised by in-house specialists.

“In most situations, drivers will continue to want to drive a Porsche themselves in the future – and will be able to do so at any time,” said Michael Steiner, head of development at Porsche parent Volkswagen Group.

“This said, there are certain aspects of partially automated driving that we are interested in. Intelligent systems like Mobileye SuperVision technology can aid the driver in everyday situations, for example by not having to keep their hands on the wheel the entire time in traffic jams.”

Volkswagen Group is already collaborating with Bosch and Qualcomm and in China with Horizon Robotics in the field of automated driving functions.

Expanded relationship

Volkswagen and Ford last October pulled their funding from start-up Argo AI, which was developing fully autonomous vehicles.

Reuters reported at the time that Volkswagen was planning to expand its collaboration with Mobileye, which was already working with Volkswagen’s software unit Cariad.

The deal is Mobileye’s second agreement for use of the SuperVision platform with a major automotive group after China’s Geely.