Intel-owned Mobileye will start building a fleet of 100 fully autonomous vehicles with a Level 4 of autonomy requiring driver interaction only to prevent an accident that the company will test in the U.S., Europe, and Israel, Intel has announced.

The first vehicles will begin testing later this year, Intel announced the day after closing its acquistion of Mobileye.

"Building cars and testing them in real-world conditions provides immediate feedback and will accelerate delivery of technologies and solutions for highly and fully autonomous vehicles," said Amnon Shashua, soon-to-be senior vice president of Intel Corporation and future CEO/CTO of Mobileye. "Geographic diversity is very important as different regions have very diverse driving styles as well as different road conditions and signage. Our goal is to develop autonomous vehicle technology that can be deployed anywhere, which means we need to test and train the vehicles in varying locations."

Rather than building a vehicle from the ground up like Google, Intel and Mobileye will convert existing vehicles that will incorporate Mobileye's computer vision, sensing, fusion, mapping and driving policy as well as Intel's open compute platforms, data center expertise, and 5G communication technologies to deliver a car-to-cloud system.

The fleet will include multiple car brands and vehicle types to demonstrate the technology’s agnostic nature.

"Our customers will benefit from our ability to use this fleet to accelerate our technology development," said Shashua. "We want to enable automakers to deliver driverless cars faster while reducing costs — data we collect will save our customers significant costs."