Bosch and Qualcomm Expand Collaboration to Strategic ADAS Solutions
The Qualcomm ADAS Express is gathering speed and is ready to slam into Mobileye.
On April 10, Bosch and Qualcomm announced an expanded collaboration to include ADAS solutions, having successfully partnered in the area of Qualcomm-based cockpit solutions. Qualcomm has already wiped out most of the legacy cockpit SoC providers, so its growing momentum in ADAS sets it onto a direct collision course with Mobileye.
Image source: Bosch
Mobileye’s main strength in ADAS in incumbency, but it looks determined to unite almost the entire automotive ecosystem against it. The closest historical precedent in the tech space is probably Intel uniting the embedded processing industry around Arm to compete against the X86 architecture, including two obscure, niche, suppliers called Nvidia and Qualcomm.
Back at the start of the century, Intel was far bigger than any one Arm competitor. But by pulling the ecosystem together, Arm steadily created a force Intel could not compete with. Each time any Arm licensee won against Intel it eroded Intel’s share.
For wont of a better description, we could call it Patriot missiles vs. a drone swarm.
Intel had to win everywhere to maintain share. Arm won each time a licensee won. What did Arm do? It created a portfolio of IP that covered the entire embedded processing waterfront. As I wrote many times in my then BROADCAST newsletter, “From M0 to A57: Sensors to Servers.”
In automotive, Qualcomm is broadly following the Arm playbook. First in the cockpit, then in ADAS, most recently in mixed-criticality SoCs covering ADAS and cockpit. So Mobileye is taking the Intel approach and doing everything itself, while Qualcomm is building an ecosystem and partnering with practically everyone.
In ADAS we can already see Qualcomm has three routes to market:
Qualcomm Snapdragon Ride Pilot: developed in partnership with BMW.
Qualcomm partners with Bosch.
There will be others, but we will look at those as they come to light.
Qualcomm took about three years to convert the Arriver driving stack acquired from Veoneer into the Ride Pilot stack developed jointly with BMW.
BMW was a key Mobileye partner for many years, using its EyeQ platform up until the iX model launched the iNEXT platform in 2021. But the relationship either soured or floundered, and BMW dramatically pivoted to Qualcomm around 2022. Ride Pilot now powers the BMW Neue Klasse platform, including the MY26 iX3 and i3 models.
Likewise, Bosch has quietly transferred its suite of proprietary ADAS and automated driving software to run on Qualcomm Snapdragon Ride SoCs and Snapdragon Ride Flex. As the new kids on the block, the partnership with Wayve is harder to judge, but we will know more in time.
Over a long enough period of time, water can erode rock. Just as with Arm, Qualcomm doesn’t care who wins. Any win for a Qualcomm SoC partner is an erosion of Mobileye’s market share in ADAS. Such is the nature of a war of attrition.
Mobileye looks like it is doing everything it can to accelerate this attrition. Let’s look at tier 1 suppliers and driver monitoring systems for more clues.