Mobileye and Volkswagen Partnership To Make Crowdsourced Real-Time Traffic Data Possible

Volkswagen and Mobileye have announced a partnership focused on autonomous vehicles. The partnership's main goal is to develop a data aggregation system for self-driving cars.

Volkswagen and Mobileye partnership. The two companies' partnership was forged under an agreement called the Road Experiment Management (REM) supply agreement. The REM agreement aims to combine data collected from Volkswagen cars with software and hardware from Israeli company Mobileye. This will enable the two to build a foundation obtaining user data for high-definition maps that get updated continuously and in real-time across a fleet of vehicles.

The agreement will also give other automakers the opportunity to provide their own data. The data can then be aggregated and resold for higher-end features such as parking location, road conditions and closures, and even real-time traffic updates.

David Leiker, a senior analyst at financial services firm Baird, commented on the partnership as saying, "We have long viewed Mobileye's REM offering as the best and optimal pathway for crowd-sourced, real-time mapping data, an essential input for autonomous driving. The structure of the agreement with VW solidifies this standing, in our view, by creating an immediate scale advantage that will only grow over time as Mobileye launches at other customers."

Mobileye currently manufactures automotive sensors and accompanying the software. Mobileye's products allow for features such as automatic braking, pedestrian detection, lane departure warnings, and adaptive cruise control to be present in many of today's cars.

Following the announcement of the agreement and the partnership, Mobileye's stock rose by more than 7 percent although it ended just slightly below that level by the end of the day. This has further widened the company's lead in the market and will most likely help achieve its goal of becoming the main supplier of autonomous sensors and software to car manufacturers. Mobileye's stock is up by more than 80 percent this year over the previous year.