Mobileye Ready to Meet FMVSS 127 with Vision-Only System

October 9, 2025

Sebastian Blanco

Mobileye's EyeQ family of SoCs supports a full spectrum of mobility solutions, from front-camera driver-assist systems to multi-sensor processing for full self-driving. (Mobileye)

In April 2024, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) finalized a new Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) to make automatic emergency braking (AEB), including pedestrian AEB, standard on all passenger cars and light trucks by September 2029. While other companies use at least two sensors –either multiple cameras, vision and radar, vision and lidar, or perhaps all three – in their AEB systems, Mobileye said today it can meet the new FMVSS No. 127 rule with a vision-only system.

Mobileye told SAE Media that it is confident that it can meet the upcoming requirement with a front-facing camera powered by an EyeQ6L SOC. This technology is used in Mobileye’s general automated driving systems, where it was put through around 200,000 hours of driving over 11 million kilometers (7.8 million miles). For FMVSS 127, Mobileye said it is building a dedicated dataset tailored to the regulation’s test procedures, which includes thousands of targeted scenarios and multiple vehicle models. Mobileye said the system’s AEB capabilities were confirmed using an EyeQ6L SoC equipped with proprietary AI models that were trained with real-world driving data.

While the EyeQ6L is the company’s “recommended path” for new assisted-driving tasks and base ADAS programs, a Mobileye spokesperson said that, “In certain programs, our previous high-volume ADAS chip may support FMVSS 127 compliance.” The newer EyeQ6L offers 4.5x more compute in 50% of the size and with similar power consumption, compared to the previous high-volume chip. “The strength of the [EyeQ6L] means it is expected to support FMVSS127 scenarios, while also leaving room for continuous improvement through over-the-air updates,” the spokesperson said.

This processing power is important because Mobileye AEB system uses AI. The company said that it was due to advances in AI and continuous model training that were a major part of how the camera-only system works. “A good example is our Intelligent Speed Assist (ISA) solution: using only vision and EyeQ4 or EyeQ6L, it’s certified to meet the EU’s General Safety Regulation requirements – and automakers can deploy it through software updates alone, without adding hardware or external maps,” the spokesperson said. “That speaks to the strength of our algorithms and the way we train them at scale.”

Mobileye doesn’t exactly feel like claiming that FMVSS 127 can be done with only a vision sensor is a bold move. OEMs have selected the company’s vision-only systems for years to meet and pass various safety ratings. “FMVSS 127 is a performance-based regulation, it doesn’t mandate sensor modality,” the spokesperson said. “For the test procedures it defines, our extensive data and validation work indicate that vision-only can achieve high performance with great efficiency, leading to low false negative and false positive alerts. How a customer chooses to use our expertise, and whether it integrates additional sensors into a project, is up to them.”

When NHTSA passed FMVSS No. 127, it said that standard AEB systems could be expected to save at least 360 lives and prevent at least 24,000 injuries each year. The new standard requires all new cars to be able to stop and avoid contact with something in front of them. Specifically, vehicles must be able to stop and avoid contact with a vehicle in front of them up to 62 mph (100 km/h). The systems have to be able to detect pedestrians at any time of day. And, AEB systems have to automatically apply the brakes when a collision with a vehicle in front is imminent at speeds up to 90 mph (145 km/h), and up to 45 mph (72 km/h) when a pedestrian is detected.