The service will leverage its Moovit platform to launch in an a US city in 2027.
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Mobileye is entering the US robotaxi market with standalone service
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One hundred robotaxis in one US city? I confidently predict it will not be Dixville Notch, New Hampshire.
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Ah yes, the Israeli-headquartered company with heavy ties to the IDF is going to start a robotaxi company that will use an imaging sensor suite on American streets. Can’t wait.
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I saw them at CES in 2025, and they talked about their interesting approach to automotive safety. They updated it for 2026 here: Mobileye CES 2026. They reject the Tesla approach of just pouring road camera data past an LLM, saying that safety requires two strategies: fast and slow thinking.
Fast is the dodging of potholes and slow is recognizing what's really happening on the road.
This sounds appropriately sophisticated! The slow thinking is a way of cutting down hallucinations.
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Normally I’d disagree with this sentiment, but “Mobileye” is exactly the name that a lazy comic book writers would use for the robotaxi front of a villainous spy organization. I mean, what other conclusion do they expect?
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Fitting they've come full circle to do what Tesla can't/won't do safely.
Mobileye has been a huge boon to many OEMs ADAS, and I'm glad to see them continuing to innovate.
Mobileye has been a huge boon to many OEMs ADAS, and I'm glad to see them continuing to innovate.
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I've heard both GM's Supercruise and Ford's Bluecruise hands-free highway ADAS systems are based on Mobileye processors / software. Looking at their "Drive" system, it doesn't seem like they have sufficient rear-facing sensing to operate at highway speeds: they need long-range rear facing sensors to merge into highway traffic -- think of a motorcycle approaching from behind at a significant speed difference. I'm interested to see how their vehicle operates in city traffic.!
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Observation: No one needs robo taxis (except VC investors in robotaxi companies). The ability to send automobiles anywhere without a driver -- and who knows what contents -- is a problem being sold as a solution.
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There are a lot of very useful reasons to have driverless taxis. People who are uncomfortable with strangers (for any reason), not dealing with "broken credit card machines" or the driver taking you the long way from the airport to downtown.
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It is a business classic.
Innovate ahead of any and all attempts to regulate it...and capture a monopoly and become too big to fail. Uber and Lyft are classic examples. After price-warring, funded by mountains of VC money, they now have turned into classic crappy non-employer contractors that abuse their workers. Now Uber and Lyft are both massive enough--they can just buy laws granting them immunity from employment security law.
Driverless taxis...are the same--but without having to pay for drivers. More profit for management.
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But no drivers/contractors to exploit so it's perfect. Literally a win win.
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Every Israeli tech company you can think of will have heavy ties to the IDF. They're all spinoffs of defense or national security technology.
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EXACTLY. I would ban the whole concept if I hadn't already accepted a very large campaign contribution.
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Almost every company because most Israelis are required to serve in the IDF, whether they agree with the policies of the government in power or not. You can probably find some company that focuses solely on ancient Jewish texts, created by Hareidim, that has no ties to the IDF.
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Or sexual assault victims, or people with special needs. Like why are you gatekeeping why you don't want to get into a contractors car with a complete stranger?
Still happens all over.
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Personally I don't see the hype behind robo taxis. As a consumer it only matters if they're comparably safe and comparably cheap. If a human driven ride is cheaper I'm using that. I don't see any of the robo taxi providers ever being able to charge a significant premium over human driven rates other than for the initial novelty. So this is not going to be a huge money maker for anyone. It's a low margin business that's going to displace some drivers with AI and charge the same rate or slightly less than human drivers over time.
The only scenario where I could see this being hugely disruptive is if robo taxi service becomes so convenient, so ubiquitous, and so cheap (like bus fare cheap) that nobody needs to own a vehicle anymore. If that happened the margin would be near zero or negative on it though.
The only scenario where I could see this being hugely disruptive is if robo taxi service becomes so convenient, so ubiquitous, and so cheap (like bus fare cheap) that nobody needs to own a vehicle anymore. If that happened the margin would be near zero or negative on it though.
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Yes, around here (SF Bay Area), Waymo and Tesla Robotaxi compete directly with Uber and Lyft on price. Today.
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I think many of these types of accidents happen because so many don’t use their blinkers. Turn on blinkers and hope motorcycle is not doing twice the speed limit.
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The tech companies releasing driverless taxis pay some of the best wages on earth to the people they employ. It’s a good thing to employ Berkeley EECS grads replacing low-skill work.
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Its like the story about 2 guys running from a bear.
"You know we cant outrun him dont you?"
"I dont need to outrun him. I just need to outrun you"
IOW they dont need to be bus cheap. Just cheaper than human driven cabs.
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Many American tech developments also started with the department of defense, so I can't fault an Israeli company for following a similar path. As a couple of examples, the first orbital launch vehicles were repurposed ICBMs (Atlas and Titan, as well as the R-7 for the Russians), and the Internet started out as a DoD project, ARPANET.
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Law makers need to start putting poison pills in robo taxi licensing.
1) Accepting the license voids all NDAs related to incidents involving the base ADAS tech.
2) Requiring proof the tech has gone at least 36 months without an incident that caused harm or major property damage.
1) Accepting the license voids all NDAs related to incidents involving the base ADAS tech.
2) Requiring proof the tech has gone at least 36 months without an incident that caused harm or major property damage.
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I would pay 2x the cost of a human driven cab to not have a human driver.
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It’s interesting people are arguing against caution on the rollout of this technology for driverless vehicles because of individual harms, while systemic harms are possible with fully automatic systems.
I see a lot of people excited about new technology around convenience without thinking ahead, and we’re not gonna get out of the doom loop like that. just as Uber and Lyft have steadily eroded the pay that their drivers get, over Time, driverless taxi companies are going to cause systemic harm In ways that could easily be guarded against.
I see a lot of people excited about new technology around convenience without thinking ahead, and we’re not gonna get out of the doom loop like that. just as Uber and Lyft have steadily eroded the pay that their drivers get, over Time, driverless taxi companies are going to cause systemic harm In ways that could easily be guarded against.
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Of course they do. They are on the Burn-VC-Money phase of the business cycle. This is normal and expected--and will be short lived.
Uber and Lyft used to pay drivers great too at the start--when burning mountains-of-VC-money paid for those businesses and their cancerous rate of expansion toward monopoly. Catch being--eventually there isn't VC money to burn and you have to run a viable business. When driverless taxis cease being a thing VCs wildly gamble money on being The Next Big Thing--their wages, too, will collapse, and the jobs will be offshored to India. Just like Uber/Lyft wages collapsed and annual mass layoffs at corporate have taken hold.
Tech companies ALL follow the same business lifespan:
- Founding and make big promises to attract investors wanting in on the Next Big Thing
- Next Big Thing must be poorly or completely unregulated. Usually because something something TECH. See Klarna for a great example--they're legally not a loan company--they're a FinTech middleman (that issues loans to people).
- Cancerous expansion courtesy of VC money due to being The Next Big Thing
- This is usually when management starts looking at being bought out by a bigger company, before the roof collapses
- Eventually VCs get bored and find Something Else to speculate on. Say Mortgage Derivatives, or the Metaverse, or AI
- Well. Damn. Now we have to find someway to make a viable business: Either bankruptcy...or enshittify
- Become too big to fail, or go off into the sunset either via scandal or simply fading.
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I think bus fare cheap would be required for a significant percentage of the population to decide they don't need to own a car. To use it occasionally alongside also owning a car I agree, it only needs to be comparable to human driven Uber/Lyft/Taxi fare.
My last Uber was about $150 1 way. Once in a blue moon that's fine but on a frequent basis that's a hard pass. By contrast bus fare is about $2 for a comparable trip. That's easily doable on a daily basis and is in fact a lot cheaper than car ownership. What's the break even rate compared to car ownership? Not sure, depends on how often you use it. Definitely more than $2 but a lot less than $150.
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re: "robotaxis are unlikely to be profitable" - Waymo has enough data accumulated that this can be estimated. This analysis - Waymo Rides, Margins, and the Path to Profitability: Forecasts Through Mid-2027 - from May 27, 2026, says that they're unlikely to be profitable on their current cars. They're using modified Jaguar iPaces, and those cost $150K to $200K when the extra sensors are added. In Q1 they were at 500K rides per week, about 20 rides per car per day, and hope to get to a million per week by the end of the year by adding cars. They're hoping to shift over to a model called Ojai, which is built in China but outfitted in Arizona, and should be more like $32K. It has a lot fewer sensors. They're also hoping to get up to 30 rides per car per day, which sounds optimistic. Waymos are already inescapable in San Francisco - you see one at every intersection - so I don't see how the utilization goes up much. Overall the economics don't look great.
Maybe this explains much of Tesla's strategy. They intend to use a custom-built really cheap and small car, the Cybercab, with very few expensive sensors. They will NOT use expensive safety systems from the likes of Mobileye, but will do it themselves. They'll trade off bad safety, like the current Teslas, against low cost. They'll make an implicit offer to customers: risk some low chance of dying because of our bad software or save a couple of bucks per ride. In a normal world they would be regulated or sued out of existence, but that's not the one we live in.
Maybe this explains much of Tesla's strategy. They intend to use a custom-built really cheap and small car, the Cybercab, with very few expensive sensors. They will NOT use expensive safety systems from the likes of Mobileye, but will do it themselves. They'll trade off bad safety, like the current Teslas, against low cost. They'll make an implicit offer to customers: risk some low chance of dying because of our bad software or save a couple of bucks per ride. In a normal world they would be regulated or sued out of existence, but that's not the one we live in.
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Oh yea. I dont see it replacing car ownership since they will always take a certain amount of time to get to you. People dont like to wait.
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I do not want to share the road with these things. Bad human drivers I can predict, but when the self driving algorithm can't handle a novel situation, it does the completely unpredictable, and it has no idea what all the honking means.
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Catch being....that forecast--is the cheapest part of a car's life span. When it is brand new.
There's a reason that AFAIK the only taxi companies with billions-dollar valuations on the stock exchange (Lyft and Uber)....don't actually own or operate or pay to maintain any cars themselves. Because cars are massively expensive to own and operate.
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Not me. I will never pay extra for anything that eliminates a job for a human unless the service is superior by a wide margin.
Same logic for why I never use self checkout at a grocery store. Why would I work for free myself for a grocery store by bagging my own groceries when I can support someone else's wages indirectly by always using a human cashier? If I got a significant discount on my groceries for bagging my own (at least 25%) I might do it but I have never seen anyone offer a discount for it.
The only cases where I would ever use a service that replaced human jobs with AI or robots is if it provides a superior service for the same price or the same service at a lower price. So for me a robo taxi has to be cheaper than a human driven ride or I will never use one. They're not going to get me there faster so they can't really provide superior service.
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Self check is about saving time by avoiding the line of people with full carts and purses full of pennies. If it gets me out of there quicker I do it.
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Semi OT, but I've been seeing autonomous VW id.Buzz lately on the road here in LA. I assume they're some pilot program, but I haven't seen anything about them online.
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Why taxis and not all vehicles? I am down, as the kids say, with driverless vehicles as imagined in Minority Report. Driving these days is a death sport. 10's of 1000's of people on the roads die every year - just in the US alone - and 100,000s more are seriously injured and/or crippled for life. I think in India it's something like a person dies on the roads once every 14 minutes or something insane like that.
When I drive now I take side streets and backroads wherever possible even if it takes me twice as long. I can get to where I'm going with far less danger and stress. Here in Ontario the goddamned Conservatives not only took out all the speed cameras - because they're politically unpopular - but went so far as to make them illegal. It's utter lunacy. So yeah, bring on the robot/AI controlled vehicles and get humans out of the equation as anything but passengers.
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Seems to me those are insufficient reasons to have driverless taxis. After all, if they're gonna grift, they're going to do it in a way you'll never know about, and you have no recourse except to pay up, then do a yelp review that'll be ignored. They can also be programmed to blast ads at you for the whole trip, all day, because that maximizes corporate income.
The driverless taxies do not always take the shortest routes, because they tend to follow more conventional ones. A meat sack driver might know shortcuts, provide you with information about the area, and will be far more impacted by a negative review than a corporate fleet of soulless people movers.
And you can sue a person for compensation. A soulless corporation? Yeah, good luck with that.
Personally, I'd rather deal with a meatsack than a soulless corporation because I have better people skills than I have access to the kind of WMD's that might fix a situation a soulless corporation created...
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Most of the people I know who regularly use Waymo are women. And the reason is always the same. Human Uber/Lyft drivers are often inappropriate or creepy.
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