Twenty years ago I watched The Fifth Element, and there's a taxi scene I never forgot. Korben Dallas flies his cab through the city with an autopilot mode built right into the dashboard, but the second things go wrong, he flips it off and takes the wheel back himself.
Twenty years later we still don't have the flying cars, but the self-driving taxi part isn't fiction anymore, and Mobileye just made it a bigger deal.
Mobileye announced it's building its own robotaxi service in the US, instead of only supplying the tech to other companies the way it has for years. It's pairing its self-driving system with Moovit, the trip-planning app it already owns, so the driving, the booking, and the fleet management all sit under one roof. They're starting small, around 100 cars in an unnamed US city sometime in 2027, with a plan to scale up to 17,000 vehicles within five years if the early rollout goes well.
Here's what actually gets me, though. Dallas had a backup plan: a person up front who could grab the wheel the moment things got dangerous. The robotaxis rolling out right now don't have that. No steering wheel, no safety driver, nobody up front at all. Mobileye's own language calls it validating the model under fully driverless conditions. There's no human fail-safe built in anywhere.
So now it's not just Waymo out there. I wrote about that whole situation back in March, and Mobileye jumping in with its own fleet means the field is getting crowded fast.
Twenty years ago the movie gave its self-driving taxi a human backup. Real life didn't.