OUR COMMUNITY
Members of the team work in the test vehicle.
ON THE COVER
Like Floating on a
PHOTOS COURTESY OF TACTILE MOBILITY
‘Cloud’
With Detroit’s help, Israeli firm creates app to give your car a smoother, more efficient ride. AMIR SHOAM CONTRIBUTING WRITER
F
or the past 16 months, 20 of the city of Detroit’s vehicles have been using Israeli software to automatically map hazards on the city’s roads. Tactile Processor, developed by Tactile Mobility of Haifa, Israel, gathers data from each car’s built-in sensors and sends it to the company’s Tactile Cloud. Then, the Cloud uses a mathematical model called SurfaceDNA to combine the crowdsourced data into a map, including each road’s grade and normalized grip level, and the locations of potholes, cracks and bumps. Boaz Funded by PlanetM, Mizrachi this proof of concept is a collaboration between the company, the city, and a major local automaker
12
|
FEBRUARY 25 • 2021
that had asked the other partners not to name it. The company was established in early 2012, under the name MobiWize, by Boaz Mizrachi and Yossi Shiri, who were later joined by their friend Alex Ackerman. While the last two have left years ago, Mizrachi remains the company’s chief technology officer. In 2010, as a lecturer at the Technion in Haifa and an experienced entrepreneur, Mizrachi was presented with the idea to develop an app that would alert drivers if they were going too fast while nearing a stop sign. However, his plans were bigger. “Gas was becoming very expensive, and everyone was trying to save it,” Mizrachi said. “I was trying to solve the problem of how to get a vehicle from point A to point B with a minimum of gas.”
“I knew nothing about cars or mapping, but I knew that I had to know things about the road, like grades and curvatures; and about the vehicle, like its capabilities and its weight.” At some point, Mizrachi had realized that most of that data had not existed. “I was sure that Google had a map that showed all of the grades on Earth, but it didn’t,” he said. “Also, if you wanted to show a 5% saving in gas, you’d need to measure it with the mean error being 1% at most. However, a vehicle’s sensor’s mean error is up to 30%, as we had shown.” The company started as part of a business incubator and developed an aftermarket system to be installed inside of a vehicle and instruct the driver on how to save gas based on the characteristics of the road and the vehicle.
