Ford’s vehicle will be specifically designed for commercial mobility services, like taxi companies, and will be available in high volumes.
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Ford, which pioneered industrial assembly line techniques in the manufacture of its famous Model T in the early years of the 20 century, is investing in and collaborating with a number of startups alongside China’s Baidu, and will double the number of people working at its Silicon Valley campus in Palo Alto, California.
Furthermore, it has been explained that the intended markets for these autonomous vehicles produced by Ford will be sold to targeted markets involving transport such as Uber.
“We learned that to achieve full autonomy, we have to take a completely different path”, Nair said. We don’t know how much testing Ford has done internally, but it will be interesting to see its further developments in the coming years.
“Our presence in Silicon Valley has been integral to accelerating our learning and the deliverables driving Ford Smart Mobility”, says Ford VP research and advanced engineering Ken Washington.
Autonomous technology is part of Ford’s “smart mobility” plan, and building a high-volume fully autonomous auto is first on the agenda.
The advance of autonomous vehicles into the mainstream hit a stumbling block in recent months, after Tesla’s Autopilot feature – a beta system created to control vehicles in a limited way in motorway driving conditions – was implicated in a series of crashes, one of them fatal. Rival General Motors Co. has a partnership with the ride-hailing company Lyft and has also bought a self-driving software company called Cruise Automation.
But Dillon Blake, senior director of business development for Runzheimer, a transportation consulting firm, says Ford’s approach could go wrong very quickly.
Ford and the Chinese search engine company Baidu will each invest $75 million in Velodyne, a company that makes laser sensors that help guide self-driving cars.
The investment, announced early Tuesday by the Silicon Valley tech firm, is meant to speed development of laser-based sensors and broaden its use in advanced driver assistance systems and eventually in self-driving cars.
The investment will allow the California-based Velodyne to expand design and manufacturing of lower-cost LiDAR sensors, which are key to helping self-driving cars gather data from the surrounding environment.
Ford also said it had made investments in Nirenberg Neuroscience, which is also developing machine vision technology, and Civil Maps, a startup that is developing 3D digital maps for use by automated vehicles.
Ford has also acquired the Israel-based computer vision and machine learning company, SAIPS, to further strengthen its expertise in artificial intelligence.
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The second-biggest USA automaker said earlier Tuesday that it’s doubling the number of people at its Silicon Valley technical center while expanding to two more buildings.
