Toyota picks Mobileye, Germany’s ZF for driver assistance tech
Agreement will expand the market reach of the Jerusalem-based maker of self-driving technologies, company says
Shoshanna Solomon was The Times of Israel's Startups and Business reporter
Japanese car maker Toyota Motor Corp has chosen Germany’s car parts maker ZF Friedrichshafen AG (ZF) and Jerusalem-based Mobileye, a maker of self-driving technologies acquired by Intel Corp. in 2017, to develop driver assistance and safety technologies for use in a variety of its vehicles in the next few years.
As part of the agreement, the two companies will work together to develop advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) for Toyota, the companies said in a statement on Tuesday.
Mobileye is a developer of chips for car cameras and driver-assistance features.
As part of the deal, Mobileye’s EyeQ4 vision computing system-on-a-chip (SoC) will be combined with ZF’s Gen 21 mid-range radar technology to precisely interpret the environment around Toyota vehicles. ZF is one of the world’s largest producers of automotive cameras based on Mobileye technology.
The new relationship with Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, marks the first time that ZF and Mobileye have been chosen by the Japanese firm and will “significantly” extend the reach of Mobileye and ZF safety technologies in the market, the statement said.
Together, these technologies will help prevent and mitigate collisions while yielding improved vehicle control, the statement said. Mobileye’s EyeQ4 technology matches computational capabilities with computer vision algorithms while rapidly processing information from the vehicle’s front-facing camera.
ZF’s Gen21 mid-range radar is a high-performance front radar that offers a wide field of view at low speeds to assist in pedestrian detection to support systems like automatic emergency braking (AEB) and a longer detection range at high speeds for systems like adaptive cruise control.
