Mobileye kicks Tesla to the curb for 'pushing the envelope in terms of safety'

We now know why Mobileye severed ties with Tesla over the summer: It didn't believe the company took safety seriously enough.

Simply put, Tesla was “pushing the envelope in terms of safety,” the chairman of Mobileye, an Israel-based company that makes collision detection systems for dozens of automakers, said Wednesday.

"[Autopilot] is not designed to cover all possible crash situations in a safe manner," Mobileye's chief technology officer, Amnon Shash, told Reuters. He added, “No matter how you spin it, [Autopilot] is not designed for that. It is a driver assistance system and not a driverless system."

The initial report of the split came not long after a series of crashes related to Tesla's Autopilot system -- one of which resulted in a fatality.

It's surprising that Mobileye executives would publicly admit the real reason for the rift. However, the split wasn't at all unpredictable.

After all, Tesla is the only automaker beta testing its autonomous driving systems on the public. So, it seems reasonable for Mobileye to want to separate itself from not only that kind of liability, but also that kind of attitude.

This week, Tesla announced it updated Autopilot to rely more on data derived from the radar system than the camera -- an upgrade that seems too little too late, at least for Mobileye.