12 | FEBRUARY 25 • 2021 

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 crowd-
sourced data into a map, 
including each road’s 
grade and normalized grip 
level, and the locations 
of potholes, cracks and 
bumps.
Funded by PlanetM, 
this proof of concept is a 
collaboration between the company, 
the city, and a major local automaker 

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. 

OUR COMMUNITY

Boaz 
Mizrachi

AMIR SHOAM CONTRIBUTING WRITER

With Detroit’s help, Israeli fi
 rm 
creates app to give your car a 
smoother, more ef
 cient ride.

Like Floating
‘Cloud’
on a

Members of the 
team work in 
the test vehicle.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF TACTILE MOBILITY

ON THE COVER

