NEW YORK (Bloomberg) -- George Hotz’s claim that he built a driverless car in his garage has created a debate on Wall Street about the future for automotive technology suppliers such as Mobileye.
The 26-year-old hacker boasted in a Bloomberg Businessweek article that he developed a cheaper alternative to Mobileye technology used by Tesla Motors Inc. and that Elon Musk offered him a “multimillion-dollar bonus with a longer time horizon that pays out as soon as we discontinue Mobileye.” The revelation sent the stock down 7.2 percent that day and wiping out this year’s gains.
While Hotz’s exploits certainly highlight that the computing know-how for autonomous driving is becoming cheaper and more accessible, that doesn’t mean Mobileye’s business model is in trouble, according to research firm Gartner Inc. Mobileye has also locked in contracts with nearly all the top automakers from General Motors to Ford Motor Co.
Hotz’s achievement “demystifies the blackbox surrounding these technologies, and it will continue to increase the commoditization of the components,” Thilo Koslowski, vice president and automotive practice leader at Gartner, said by phone. “The magic still exists in putting it all together and doing it reliably.”
Mobileye’s edge
That involves having the financial firepower to deal with insurance liabilities, regulatory hurdles, the threat of cyber attacks on connected cars and the absolute perfection of the automated driver-assistance system, he added.
Musk said as much in a tweeted rebuttal to Hotz’s claim: “Getting a machine learning system to be 99% correct is relatively easy, but getting it to be 99.9999% correct, which is where it ultimately needs to be, is vastly more difficult.”
Mobileye co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Amnon Shashua, a computer science professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, called Hotz’s claims “nonsense,” arguing that any student of his could achieve the same in six months.
Read More: https://www.autonews.com/article/20151220/OEM06/151229999/is-self-driving-technology-becoming-commoditized?
The 26-year-old hacker boasted in a Bloomberg Businessweek article that he developed a cheaper alternative to Mobileye technology used by Tesla Motors Inc. and that Elon Musk offered him a “multimillion-dollar bonus with a longer time horizon that pays out as soon as we discontinue Mobileye.” The revelation sent the stock down 7.2 percent that day and wiping out this year’s gains.
While Hotz’s exploits certainly highlight that the computing know-how for autonomous driving is becoming cheaper and more accessible, that doesn’t mean Mobileye’s business model is in trouble, according to research firm Gartner Inc. Mobileye has also locked in contracts with nearly all the top automakers from General Motors to Ford Motor Co.
Hotz’s achievement “demystifies the blackbox surrounding these technologies, and it will continue to increase the commoditization of the components,” Thilo Koslowski, vice president and automotive practice leader at Gartner, said by phone. “The magic still exists in putting it all together and doing it reliably.”
Mobileye’s edge
That involves having the financial firepower to deal with insurance liabilities, regulatory hurdles, the threat of cyber attacks on connected cars and the absolute perfection of the automated driver-assistance system, he added.
Musk said as much in a tweeted rebuttal to Hotz’s claim: “Getting a machine learning system to be 99% correct is relatively easy, but getting it to be 99.9999% correct, which is where it ultimately needs to be, is vastly more difficult.”
Mobileye co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Amnon Shashua, a computer science professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, called Hotz’s claims “nonsense,” arguing that any student of his could achieve the same in six months.
Read More: https://www.autonews.com/article/20151220/OEM06/151229999/is-self-driving-technology-becoming-commoditized?
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