Mobileye apparently wants to own some of the robotaxi market, even if that puts it in direct competition with companies it supplies its self-driving system to.

The driving technology company Mobileye plans to launch a robotaxi service in an as-yet-unnamed US city in 2027, it said earlier today. The service will be vertically integrated, using Mobileye's Moovit mobility platform to interact with customers booking rides, coordinate drivers, and so on. The Israeli company, which was bought by Intel in 2017 before going public again in 2022, says it will start with around 100 robotaxis early next year.

"Mobileye has spent more than two decades building the technologies required for autonomous driving," said Amnon Shashua, founder and CEO of Mobileye. "Today we are taking the next step: combining those technologies with operational ownership to create a financially and geographically scalable robotaxi business designed from the ground up for global deployment."

The company first rose to prominence in the mid-2010s, when Tesla began using Mobileye's advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) as part of Autopilot. That relationship lasted until 2016, when Mobileye dropped Tesla as a customer after being alarmed that a driver assistance system was being sold to end users as driverless technology. Since then, Mobileye has continued to work with other partners on ADAS and autonomous vehicles.

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Tesla didn’t report a single at-fault “Robotaxi” crash in the latest NHTSA autonomous-vehicle data — its only fresh incident was a Model Y getting rear-ended while stopped, clearly the other driver’s fault.

That sounds like good news for Tesla’s safety record. But live fleet data points to the real reason the crashes have dried up: Tesla’s robotaxis are barely running, and the active fleet is shrinking a year into the program.

Baidu’s Apollo Go has received a Level 4 autonomous driving permit in Switzerland for AmiGo, a robotaxi service it is running with Swiss Post’s PostBus, putting the Chinese tech giant ahead of Waymo and Tesla in deploying driverless vehicles into European public transport.

The Federal Roads Office (FEDRO) special permit covers an 80 km² service area across three eastern cantons, and Baidu says the project is on track to become the largest planned automated public transport operation of its kind in Europe.