Intel announces a dedicated self-driving tech unit, Automated Driving Group, headed by former IoT chief Doug Davis, as it partners with Mobileye and Delphi
Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
The BMW-Intel-Mobileye autonomous car effort first surfaced as a rumor in July 2016 (Bloomberg reported the three were working together); today's announcement turns that loose collaboration into Intel org-chart reality, with a dedicated Automated Driving Group run by former IoT chief Doug Davis and Delphi named alongside Mobileye as a partner.
The move matters because it positions Intel as a compute-and-platform supplier to the auto industry rather than a bystander while rivals chase the same stack — and the follow-on coverage shows the bet compounding: Delphi formally joined the alliance in May 2017 (BMW, Intel and Mobileye brought the supplier into the initiative), and after acquiring Mobileye, Intel committed to a fleet of 100 fully autonomous Level 4 test cars across the US, Israel and Europe.
First-order effects
- Doug Davis's shift from IoT to the Automated Driving Group gives the BMW-Mobileye-Delphi program a single accountable owner inside Intel, ending the period when self-driving work sat informally across business units.
- Delphi and Mobileye now have a defined channel into Intel silicon and software roadmaps, converting what was a sourcing relationship into a co-development one.
Second-order effects
- Other automakers and Tier-1 suppliers face pressure to lock in their own chip-plus-software alliances, since the Intel-BMW-Mobileye-Delphi group is assembling the full autonomy stack — sensors-to-silicon — before they have.
- Mobileye's data-centric plans, including the road experience management harvesting and EyeQ4 SoC integration detailed in early 2018, give the consortium a data moat that forces competing suppliers like Delphi's peers to choose between joining and being locked out of mapping-scale driving data.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, self-driving consolidates into a few vertically integrated consortia — chipmaker plus automaker plus Tier-1 plus perception-software owner — rather than each OEM building alone, with Mobileye's Jerusalem fleet expansion (100 cars already testing there) showing how quickly such alliances move from announcement to deployment.
- Intel's trajectory from unit formation to acquisition to mobility-service ambitions ([[a:941846|Shashua later framed Intel's plans around an autonomous mobility service and LIDAR alternatives]]) points toward semiconductor companies becoming mobility platform operators, not just component vendors.
The trend: Chipmakers are reorganizing into dedicated autonomy units and binding automakers and Tier-1 suppliers into closed compute-plus-data consortia, making self-driving a platform land-grab rather than a per-OEM engineering project.