Let me explain most interesting headline in autonomy so far this summer.
You've probably never heard of Mobileye, ticker
$MBLY.
But if your car beeps when you drift out of your lane, or brakes before you do, there's a good chance a Mobileye chip is doing it. For over two decades they've been the quiet supplier β they make the "eyes and brain," carmakers drop them in the car. They never touch the customer.
That changed last month.
Mobileye announced it's going to build and run its OWN robotaxi service. Not sell the tech to someone else β operate the fleet themselves. 100 driverless cars in a US city next year, 17,000 in five.
Here's what makes it fascinating. Picture the company that makes pizza ovens suddenly opening its own pizza chain. Great β now they keep the whole pie instead of just selling the oven. Except every restaurant they used to sell ovens to just became a competitor. That's Mobileye now: it sells self-driving systems to Ford and VWβ¦ and is about to compete with them for the same riders.
The bull case: they might be the only player who owns the entire thing β the chip, the car, and a quiet secret weapon, an app called
@moovit . Moovit is the most-used public-transit app on Earth β the thing well over a billion people open to find the next bus, train, or subway. Almost everyone else building robotaxis has no direct line to riders and has to lean on Uber and other aggregators for demand. Mobileye has one built in.
The catch: a bus-and-train crowd is not obviously a robotaxi crowd. These are people hunting the cheapest way across town β so turning even a slice of them into riders who'll pay up for a private driverless car is the billion-dollar "if."
The bear case: they were a cash-rich company that sold parts. Now they have to buy thousands of cars, run them, insure them, and pick a fight with their own customers. That's a completely different β and far more expensive β business.
Same stock. Two totally different companies, depending on which story wins. The number that settles it β how much each car actually earns β management telling us until their Capital Markets Day later this year.
π Mark your calendar.