Ford Motor Company recently announced that by 2021, they will be launching fully autonomous vehicles for commercial operation such as ride hailing and /or ride sharing as part of the Ford Smart Mobility plan.With it, the company intends to be at the top of the autonomous vehicle fields and in ride sharing.
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The US automaker said it was fuelling the effort with ramped up investments in technology and by doubling the size of the team at its autonomous-car campus in Silicon Valley.
But Mr. Fields said Ford isn’t interested in being the first auto maker to put a fully autonomous vehicle on the market, noting “we’re not in a race to make announcements”.
California-based Velodyne said the cash infusion will enable it to quickly expand the design and production of “LiDAR” high-performance sensors for autonomous vehicles.
“From the very beginning of our autonomous vehicle program, we saw LiDAR as key enabler due to its sensing capabilities and how it complements radar and cameras”, Ford executive vice-president and chief technology officer Raj Nair said in a joint statement. “That is what it takes to make autonomous vehicles a reality for millions of people around the world”.
Ford said it expects to deploy 30 self-driving Fusion Hybrid prototypes this year, and 90 next year. Nissan pledged it would roll out 10 new models within the next five years with a range of self-driving features aimed at individual buyers, including a fully autonomous auto.
“We want the cost to be low enough to be used for all cars”, said Velodyne president of business development Marta Hall.
However, this still means that the vehicle will have no steering wheel, accelerator or brake pedals, so Ford believes the user experience will be largely indistinguishable from full SAE Level 5 autonomy.
Ford rivals, including General Motors and Uber Technologies, are also developing self-driving vehicles for use in ride services.
“The next decade will be defined by automation of the automobile, and we see autonomous vehicles as having as significant an impact on society as Ford’s moving assembly line did 100 years ago”. Chinese web-service provider Baidu Inc. invested in Velodyne alongside Ford.
Nair said Ford, with its investments and its acquisition of SAIPS, an Israeli machine learning startup, now have the tools in place to develop a fully driverless vehicle, but said “there’s still a lot of engineering development” between now and 2021.
Ford believes that semi-autonomous systems are actually unsafe, Nair said.
Ford’s forays mark the latest attempt to keep up as traditional vehicle companies and Silicon Valley upstarts race to deliver automated-driving technologies.
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In order to encompass the plans for this autonomous vehicle, Mark stated that the plans are by the end of 2017 to have doubled the current workforce of the facility.
