My wife and I recently traveled in Israel and Jordan and during last couple of days, we rented a car to drive around Northern Israel. The vehicle had this little gadget stuck on the left side of front windshield. I had no idea what it was and as always, I told myself “we will figure it out”. It turned out to be the Mobileye!

I was pleasantly surprised by the various things it did, which I will describe first. Then, when we met up with my wife’s colleagues, I learned a little bit more about it. All of this was fascinating for me, so I thought I would share it with you all.

It was pretty amazing on a lot of counts. The first and foremost that I noticed was that it provided good audio alert like the lane assist that we have in one of our Camry’s. You stray from your lane, it provided a visual of the line turning into a flashing red and an audio cue. Great job.

The other thing that fascinated me was that it displayed the speed limits accurately. It is true that I am used to this in Waze and Google Maps, but unfortunately, Google Maps in Israel was not displaying it. I rely on it so much when I drive, especially in foreign countries. And in Israel, the speed limit changes were happening quite often in highways (in some stretches). I was warned by a friend of ours who lived there that there are a lot of cameras watching for speeding and you will be ticketed heavily. Given that I was already worried about the cost of gas for the car (about $8/gallon), I was determined not to get a ticket!

It also had the feature that comes with radar cruise control in our Camry which tells you how close to a car you are. Mobileye was pretty fancy about it in that it gave you info on how many car lengths you are from the rear of the vehicle in front of you based on your speed and the speed of the vehicle before you. Pretty cool. At 120 kmph, the vehicle before me may look pretty far off, but Mobileye would tell me what the reality is.

It also has a pedestrian check! When you are driving in local streets with a lot of pedestrian crossings, this is immensely helpful. I am assuming that the radar detection in my Camry can do it, though I have not experienced it so far. Similarly, Mobileye can detect vehicles approaching you in the opposite direction and turn the high beam off, something my Camry also does.

So, why am I all excited about this enough to write about it? Well, I don’t have any fancy car like Tesla which may have all of these already. My recent Camry has some but not all.

But this is a single and small device that does a lot and does everything on the fly! All of this using artificial intelligence and computer vision. In other words, if the speed limit changed due to construction and someone just put up a sign, it can tell that you instantaneously! I really don’t know how much it costs or how much to install it, but I intend to find out because we have two more cars that were bought earlier which do not have all these features!

We heard a lot about this from my wife’s colleagues. This product is the result of computer vision research by a faculty member from Hebrew University and Intel now owns it. They  said that the Israeli government provides this as an incentive to its citizens because they believe that this reduces accidents and saves lives. I have not been able to find anything on the web about this, so I cannot confirm. But if it is true, it is great!

I can vouch for how efficient this thingy is and how helpful it was for me!