Porsche, through the Volkswagen Group, exited its investments in Argo AI last year. A few hours after Ford, itself an investor in the young startup, the German car manufacturer preferred to turn its head despite an investment of more than a billion dollars. For good reason, a significant delay in the development of autonomous car technologies, due to a lack of investment and a particularly costly activity.
Eight months later, we have just learned that a new partner will be working with Porsche. Mobileye, an Israeli company born in 1999, has strengthened its ties with the Volkswagen group brand, after an initial agreement signed in 2016 in the middle of CES in Las Vegas. This time around, it’s pretty clear that the development of tomorrow’s autonomous Porsche will be signed and equipped with technologies from this company that went public last year.
Mobileye earns $13 billion on the stock market
From a valuation of $17 billion in October 2022, to $31 billion today, Mobileye has succeeded in its operation perfectly, at the time when Volkswagen and Porsche killed off Argo AI. The former Intel subsidiary, bought in 2017 for $15 billion, continues to develop autonomous driving and navigation technologies that manufacturers seem to be fond of, determined to no longer spend astronomical sums on the design themselves. self-driving cars internally.
© Porsche
Until now, its investors already saw a bright future for the company, which relied on a partnership with the Chinese group Geely, which owns the brands Volvo, Lotus and Lynk & Co. Porsche is the second automotive giant to sign and eyeing the “SuperVision” plan of Mobileye, which develops both the technologies necessary for autonomous driving but also for navigation.
© Market Cap Companies
One day after Cariad’s announcement
The package of technologies behind SuperVision already makes it possible today to program a route on a car, allowing the driver to completely let go of the steering wheel, and the car to change lanes and overtake slower vehicles in front. . Volkswagen still seems to rely on in-house development for its models, but more premium and very profitable brands like Porsche must keep up the pace and offer autonomous solutions as quickly as possible to follow Tesla and the rest of the premium brands.
Remember that Porsche also aims to offer its cars in the form of a subscription. To move from a product to a service, as Lynk & Co is trying to do on the side of Geely, autonomous driving is important, if not essential.
The announcement, already decisive for the roadmap of Porsche, comes the day after that of Volkswagen to dismiss the majority of the members of the board of directors of the subsidiary Cariad. At the heart of the development of the automotive group’s software part, it has greatly slowed down the launch of models (including at Porsche with the Macan) and will require two more years to be able to carry out the development of version 2.0 of the digital infrastructure of Volkswagen, intended for the autonomous car.
