Mobileye’s self-driving Ford runs a red light in Jerusalem demo

Intel-owned Mobileye put its self-driving technology to the test last week–and failed. During a demonstration, one of its autonomous cars ran a red light.

Mobileye is attempting to expand beyond the advanced driver assisted systems it currently sells into fully autonomous car technology.  The company just debuted the first set of cars that will comprise its 100-strong self-driving car fleet in Jerusalem. But the error, supposedly caused by interference from electromagnetic interference thanks to a camera crew filming nearby, points to a larger issue within self-driving tech: There’s no one standard for rolling out this new tech (something I’ve pointed out in the past). Ensuring safety and determining how this technology hits the streets is largely up to the people making it.

Despite the incident, Mobileye remains an important player in the overall autonomous space. “They have some excellent machine vision capabilities and their EyeQ family of processors has been very useful in getting lane departure warning and prevention systems into the marketplace broadly,” says Sam Abuelsamid, a senior analyst at Navigant Research. “I think they also have some excellent ideas with their Responsibility Sensitive Safety model that tries to mathematically prevent an automated driving system from issuing a command that would cause a crash.”

Still there are hurdles for Mobileye ahead. For more on this, I encourage everyone who’s interested to read this Ars Technica article.