Automotive parasitism: Examining Mobileye’s ‘car-agnostic’ platformisation

The article examines a ‘trinity’ of interconnected components by Mobileye, a company moving into autonomous driving. However, Mobileye is neither an automotive manufacturer, nor a nominal ‘big tech’ company, but an established maker of ‘bolt-on’ advanced driver assist systems (ADAS), able to draw on over 65 million vehicles. Through these devices, Mobileye is undertaking a ‘platformisation’, transforming from an automotive supplier into a provider of autonomous vehicle (AV) platforms. We characterise this as a ‘car-agnostic’ approach to autonomous driving. Mobileye represents the advancement, and modulation, of a platform logic into a different type of hardware: the car. To understand the implications of this, we argue that Mobileye acts parasitically in three ways: by inserting itself between driver and vehicle, vehicle manufacturer and vehicle data, and specific vehicles and the emerging AV industry.