Here’s the latest piece of analysis from Colin Barnden, Lead Analyst at Semicast Research on Seeing Machines, Driver Monitoring Systems (DMS) and the auto industry.

“EuroNCAP has moved to 2022*. This is why contracts aren’t being announced, as OEMs and T1s have more time to do evaluations (see Hansen Report). Ironically, the delay takes away the ‘Takata penalty’ hanging over Seeing Machines. Had 2020 stood for camera DMS, pretty much every OEM would have had to go with SmartEye, other Tier 2s or the in-house Japanese Tier 1s. The first half of 2019 is likely to be busy for OEM direct wins, ready for 2022.

Level 4 is dead for mass market vehicles. The trend I see is ‘less autonomy, more DMS’ (L2/3 with DMS). That suggests to me the technically best DMS. The key part of Fovio is the hardware accelerators for real-time vision analysis (and to lower power consumption). ‘Hardware agnostic’ is a trade-off not a free ride. The significance of the 1.3 bn kms RNS in the summer is also now clear. Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning is all about quantity of data. I see Seeing Machines even put live updates of the total on their website. This is smart.

OEMs are acutely aware of regulatory and political threats. Dieselgate was a disaster and emissions in general has been handled poorly. Now the political threat is number of road deaths (hence Vision Zero) and that issue is also being dumped on OEMs’ doormats. Waymo and robo-taxis are an existential threat, OEMs have got to find a way to reduce fatalities fast and win political points. They won’t mess up twice and DMS is the obvious way to proceed. Again that suggests technical excellence over anything. If they are smart, OEMs will ‘front run’ the politics and put DMS into everything as fast as they possibly can. There could be a huge ramp from 2023-2025. Again, a fast ramp up supports longer evaluation times and careful decisions for T1s and T2s.

That’s as far as market analysis can go. What matters now is the actual decisions OEMs make. My role is to make an argument but it is up to everyone to make their own individual decisions about how they think things will play out. No one has a crystal ball.”

*’Europe on the Move’ announced Advanced Distraction Recognition (camera-based DMS) from September 2023. EuroNCAP 5* requirements are looking like they will move to demand camera DMS about a year before.

Chris Menon holds Seeing Machines stock.