"Technology will make it possible to reduce traffic accidents by ninety percent"

This is what Autotox CEO Hagi Ziss said at the meeting of the Israeli Chip Club. Lior Zino, CEO of Acmotion: In Israel there are about 450 startup companies operating in the field of the automobile that has become a computer on wheels."

The article was first published on 16/1/2017 and was re-uploaded following the acquisition of Mobileye by Intel for 15.3 billion dollars.

From right to left: Hagi Ziss, CEO of Autotox, Ran Ahitov, CEO of Magma Ventures, Lior Zino, CEO of Ecomotion, and Shlomo Gerdman, CEO of ASG, at the Chip Club meeting, December 2016. Photo: Shmuel Oster

"Technology will make it possible to reduce traffic accidents by ninety percent." This is what Hagi Ziss, CEO of Autotox, said in a panel held as part of the Israeli chip club meeting that dealt with the revolution in the automotive world and Israel's role in it. In addition to Zis, Lior Zino, CEO of Acmotion and Ran Ahitov, CEO of Magma Venture Partners, also participated in the panel.

"Despite all the improvements made by the vehicle manufacturers, in recent years there has been an increase in traffic accidents due to distraction." Says Ziss "in the USA, 32 thousand people are killed every year in car accidents, and a huge amount of damage worth 230 billion dollars is caused. If technology is introduced into the automotive world, safety can be improved and these numbers can be drastically reduced, perhaps even by 90%, when the cars will be autonomous but also during the transition period to autonomous vehicles," said Hagai Ziss, CEO of Autotox at the quarterly and final chip club meeting for the year 2016.

"Autotox operates in the field of connecting cars to each other. Many cars have long been equipped with a cellular SIM that reports malfunctions to the car manufacturers. This is nothing new. What we are developing is a system that allows cars to talk to each other and to the infrastructure (traffic lights as an example) for safety purposes."

"Until we reach a fully autonomous vehicle, it is possible to provide technologies that will drastically reduce road accidents. It is not instead of sensing the road using sensors as it is done today. When cars exchange information to prevent traffic accidents at intersections where there is no line of sight. In the US, the administration issued a regulation according to which basic and secure communication technology will be mandatory in all cars starting in 2021."

Shlomo Gerdman, CEO of ASG and moderator of the panel, asked Zino how it happened that Israel, a country that had only one car manufacturer and that too a negligible one, suddenly became a powerhouse in the automotive field, and what is the reason why the high-tech world and the automotive world, which were operating at the same time, suddenly discovered each other?

Zino: "About 450 startup companies in the automotive field are active in Israel. The trends in the world of technology and in the world of transportation that resulted in a car not being a bin on wheels and a car manufacturer is not just a component of parts but that the car is a computer on wheels. This is where Israel's strengths come in - the startup nation: capabilities in the areas of software, chips, artificial intelligence. All these things are settled on Israel's strengths that allow technologies to take part in this game, while at the same time in recent years we also see some key players who started to wake up in these years if it is Wise who became a significant player also in the world and attracted international attention. Mobileye which has become a leader in the field of sensing systems for autonomous vehicles as well as international players. GM opened a development center in 2008 and began to train people in the automotive field, and Better Place also, despite its failure, contributed its share because many of the Better Place employees dispersed throughout the industry and brought a lot of knowledge and international connections.

"Ecomotion is a non-profit organization established in 2012 as a joint venture of the Fuel Substitutes Administration in the Prime Minister's Office and the Israel Institute for Innovation with the support of the Ministry of Economy with the aim of encouraging Israeli innovation in the areas of automobiles, transportation, and public transportation. We mapped the Israeli ecosystem, there were 87 companies then. I joined Ekomotion after a year, at the end of 2013. The crazy growth of companies in this field - the large number of international companies that come to Israel and are interested in Israeli technologies is reaching crazy proportions. In the past year, delegations of senior officials have visited the country looking for Israeli technologies at least once a month. We know how to provide the things that are required in the industry today."

"We use the model of an innovation community with the aim of bringing all the players to one place and seeing how the stew can be refined. Entrepreneurs, industry people, government, academia, investors, anyone who can be connected to the ecosystem and see how they can be connected. To this end, we hold investor events, exposure exhibitions, and actons. We have a very large membership base. In particular, we are trying to help transportation innovation permeate the lives of every citizen, among other things through the municipalities, which are the weak links in the gap we have identified.

Ran Ahitov: "The Magma Ventures venture capital fund invested in Wise and continues today to specialize in the automotive sector. Ahitov: "As of today, he has four companies in the automotive field in his portfolio - Autotox, in which we invested eight years ago, Argos, which deals with cyber security for cars, Inviz, which develops LEDAR sensors, and Valance, which made a conversion to the automotive field that is much more significant than their previous model. Members of the boards of directors of most of the car manufacturers came here, and together with Akomotion an ecosystem was built that makes it possible to create significant companies. Many entrepreneurs who until now only thought of ideas in the cyber field are establishing ventures in the field of transportation."

In response to moderator Shlomo Gerdman's question what was the motive for the technological revolution sweeping the automotive industry, Ahitov answered: "The economics of an electric motor allowed new players to look at the market. This coincides with the connectivity revolution, but the initial factor in my opinion was the electric car, when Tesla built a brand from scratch in four years."

"Ten years ago, it took 1,200 laptops to reach the power of one NVIDIA or Mobileye chip of 2020."