Volkswagen and Mobileye are forging a new partnership focused on the deployment of self-driving vehicles.

Executives with the two companies announced a new joint venture Monday and unveiled plans to launch an autonomous ride-hailing service on the streets of Israel beginning early next year. Service will start in a testing phase and gradually shift to commercial deployment tentatively planned for 2022.

Volkswagen will contribute electric vehicles to the project and supplier Mobileye will provide the self-driving system capable of Level 4 autonomous operations, one competent enough to require no involvement from a human driver. Mobileye, based in Jerusalem, has been testing the technology on public roads in Israel for more than a year.

The new joint venture, called New Mobility in Israel, was rolled out during the Smart Mobility Summit in Tel Aviv this week.

Some details remain undisclosed. The two companies have not said which of VW's EVs will be used for the project, nor have they indicated whether the service will be available for members of the public to use at the onset.

But broadly, the tie-up places the two companies within a group of front-runners in a global race to deploy and scale businesses around autonomous technology.

"By the time the commercial service rolls out in 2022, there will be several dozen vehicles deployed and we will quickly scale to hundreds of vehicles as the geography of the program expands," a Mobileye spokesperson said.