Tesla is parting ways with Mobileye, the startup that supplies the electric automaker with chips that enable its fleet of vehicles to drive autonomously. Mobileye CTO Ammon Sashua broke the news during the company's second quarter earnings call on Tuesday.
Sashua said Mobileye will continue to maintain and support current Tesla products that use its technology, including a significant upgrade of several functions in the works that affect both the ability to respond to crash avoidance and to optimize auto-steering in the near term.
Furthermore, Sashua said Mobileye will continue to pursue similar partnerships like the one it had with Tesla. Mobileye stock is down more than eight percent in after-hours trading as of writing.
What this likely means, as Re/code points out, is that Tesla will move to develop its own tech in-house.
The admission comes just a few weeks after reports surfaced that one of Tesla's Model S vehicles was involved in a fatal accident in which its Autopilot feature was engaged. When asked about the incident by Re/code, Sashua said its technology is only capable of helping to avoid accidents with vehicles in front of it, not trucks that happen to be crossing the highway laterally which is what took place in the fatal crash.
Tesla, meanwhile, said its Autopilot system is supposed to recognize "any interruption of the ground plane in the path of the vehicle." In this instance, however, the high, white side of the truck's trailer combined with a radar signature that would have looked very similar to an overhead sign, caused the system not to apply the brakes.