Mobileye shifts from supplier to operator with planned 2027 US robotaxi service launch

Mobileye to launch its own US robotaxi service in 2027

The company has spent 25 years selling autonomous-driving systems to carmakers without competing with them. A planned 2027 robotaxi service in the US changes that, pitting Mobileye against some of the very customers it supplies. For 25 years, Mobileye has been the arms dealer of self-driving, selling the cameras, chips, and software that now sit inside more than 230 million cars, while pointedly leaving the driving business to everyone else. On 16 June, it said it would start doing the driving itself. The Jerusalem company announced plans to launch its own robotaxi service in a US city in 2027, moving from supplying autonomous-driving technology to owning and operating an autonomous ride-hailing business outright. Investors liked it: the shares rose about 6 per cent. Mobileye plans to start small, with a fleet of around 100 vehicles in a major US metro area, phased through 2027 and running fully driverless. If that works, it wants to scale to roughly 17,000 vehicles over the following five years. From supplier to operator The shift matters because of what Mobileye has always been. Its Mobileye Drive system is sold as a standalone product that carmakers and mobility operators plug into their own vehicles, the neutral-supplier position that made it a partner to almost everyone. Running its own service breaks that neutrality. It puts Mobileye in direct competition with some of the customers that license Mobileye Drive, a tension the company is clearly aware of. It frames the move as a "complementary path to market" rather than a replacement, and insists its commitment to supplying partners "does not alter". To pull the full stack together, Mobileye is leaning on Moovit, the trip-planning app it owns, for the consumer-facing side: booking, multimodal routing, rider engagement, and fleet operations. Moovit says it reaches 1.7 billion users across more than 3,500 cities, which is the kind of demand-side reach a new operator would otherwise take years to build. A swipe at Waymo, and a late start Chief executive Amnon Shashua framed the launch as a corrective to a market he says has narrowed. "The industry has become increasingly dependent on a small number of technology providers and business models," he said, a thinly veiled nod to Waymo's commanding lead and Tesla's push. The problem is that 2027 is late to make that argument. Waymo is already running hundreds of thousands of paid rides a week across a growing list of US cities, while Mobileye's own supplier deals have had a habit of slipping, including the Verne robotaxi launch in Zagreb that switched from Mobileye to Pony.ai before going live. The vertical-integration logic is sound, and increasingly fashionable. XPeng is making the same bet, that owning the chip, the software, and the operation produces a better robotaxi than stitching the pieces together. Mobileye owns more of that stack than most. The hard part is the business, not the driving The deeper question is financial. Selling chips is a high-margin, asset-light business; running a fleet of robotaxis is the opposite, a capital-hungry grind of vehicles, depots, cleaning, insurance, and teleoperators that even Waymo is still working to make pay, hence its cheaper, purpose-built Ojai vehicle. Mobileye, still majority-owned by Intel and fresh from a roughly $900m deal for humanoid-robot startup Mentee Robotics, is taking on that burden just as it pushes into physical AI. It says it will share commercialisation and operational detail at a Capital Markets Day before the end of 2026. The targets are bold; whether Mobileye can run a robotaxi business as well as it builds the technology behind one is the thing those numbers have to prove.

Mobileye Announces Plans to Launch Vertically Integrated Robotaxi Business in U.S. City

Mobileye announced plans to expand its robotaxi activities beyond supplying self-driving technology and into full ownership of an autonomous ride-hailing business. The new initiative, set to launch in a U.S. city in 2027, marks a significant evolution of Mobileye's strategy, combining its autonomous driving capabilities with fleet operations, rider services, and mobility management into a single vertically integrated offering. Mobileye Drive serves as a standalone self-driving system that is being integrated into partner programs. Under the new planned initiative, Mobileye will extend its role across the entire robotaxi value chain, combining Mobileye Drive with its Moovit subsidiary?s Mobility Platform and consumer-facing applications, multi-modal trip planning, AV mission control, fleet-management technologies and integration with teleoperation infrastructure. Mobileye is planning to prepare an initial fleet of about 100 vehicles targeted for deployment in a major metropolitan U.S. market beginning in 2027. The deployment is planned to be phased throughout the year and is intended to validate the operational model under fully driverless conditions. Following successful operation of the initial fleet, Mobileye plans to scale the business substantially, targeting approximately 17,000 vehicles over the following five years. Mobileye Drive builds on more than 25 years of experience in computer vision, mapping, sensing, and autonomous driving technologies, using the latest Compound AI approaches blending multiple AI techniques and robust safety frameworks within an engineered architecture. More than 230 million vehicles worldwide have been produced with Mobileye technology inside, providing a foundation of real-world experience unmatched in the industry. The initiative also extends Moovit?s strategy of helping riders discover, plan and use transportation services more easily in complex urban environments. Moovit?s mobility platform serves more than 1,700,000,000 users across more than 3,500 cities in 112 countries and 45 languages. Moovit's expertise in consumer mobility, multimodal trip planning, rider engagement and fleet operations provides a critical foundation for scaling autonomous mobility services globally.