It means Ford will be going after the same ride-sharing and ride-hailing market that Apple is said to target with its self-driving electric cars. It is unclear if the auto will eventually become available as a consumer vehicle, but Ford is dedicating an entire branch of its company to the self-driving auto project.
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The individual vehicle ownership will still see features of driver assist functions, however, Ford said, human will have the ultimate control of the auto.
Ford Chief Executive Mark Fields said on CNBC on Tuesday that the investment will help Ford transition to a mobility company.
Ford CEO Mark Fields said that autonomous cars will be just as important to Ford as the assembly line.
Ford announced its plan to have fully autonomous vehicles on the roads by 2021. The old guard is coming. The car-maker hasn’t ruled out working with ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft, companies that already have arrangements with Toyota and General Motors. “We have a strategic advantage because of our ability to combine the software and sensing technology with the sophisticated engineering necessary… to make autonomous vehicles a reality for millions of people around the world”. Ford has increased its Silicon Valley presence and invested in four companies to allow its vehicle to come to fruition, allowing it to properly develop the 3D mapping, LIDAR, cameras and sensors to make fully autonomous transport possible.
Operations in Silicon Valley are to expand also with a dedicated campus in Palo Alto that is scheduled to open by mid-2017.
“The first application of the fully autonomous vehicle will be commercial applications, whether it’s ride-hailing or parcel delivery”, Fields said.
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There is already quite a number of autonomous cars now being tested by Ford, and they are seeking to triple their numbers by the end of this year. It has struck an exclusive agreement with Nirenberg Neuroscience LLC, a machine vision company, to bring human intelligence into machine learning for its virtual driver system. This would triple again next year.
