Though fully autonomous vehicles won’t be rolling out for another decade or two, equities analysts are already finding investment potential in Mobileye, the makers of new collision avoidance technology that is slated to become standard in most new cars.
As reported by CNBC, Morgan Stanley’s lead automobile sector analyst was bullish on buying stock in Mobileye which specializes improving driver safety with collision detection technology. Such technology is a component of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), which he says will soon become standard in new automobiles long before fully autonomous cars hit the road.
“Toyota has already said that pretty much every car that they sell in the U.S. is going to have ADAS by 2017, 70 percent of cars they sell in Europe by 2015. Volkswagen said something similar a few years out,” he said.
“Nissan is already making an automatic braking standard in Japan by the fall of this year. If you assume roughly 100 million cars sold by the end of this decade, we say 40 percent will have ADAS options by 2020 and that goes up to 70 percent by 2029,” said Shanker. He raised his Mobileye price target from $65 to $68 and held his overweight rating on its shares.
A similar play happened a few years ago in hybrid vehicle technologies, where some typically hybrid systems were rolled out across entire model classes and platforms that were not “classic” hybrids.
Mobileye does have some skeptics
But not all analysts were as bullish on Mobileye stock, which is facing more driverless automobile technology competition from companies like Google.
Steve Grasso, Director of Institutional Sales with Stuart Frankel, also raised concerns that Mobileye’s collision prevention technology relies primarily on cameras, compared to competitors who use radars and cameras.
“If you start to see these little companies start to build, it’s radar that they have to start building on, not just camera base so I think that’s more accurate and I think with driverless cars you’re going to see that type of technology overtake Mobileye,” Grasso said.
