That essentially means that customers will hail an autonomous Ford to ride in when they require transport, and the cars can be shared between different users every day. Ford is among the growing ranks of automakers and technology companies investing in autonomous vehicles, with firms like Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL) pushing ahead with self-driving plans.
Advertisement
Asserting that the next ten-year period will be defined by “automation of the automobile”, Fields said: “We see autonomous vehicles as having as big an impact on society as Ford’s moving assembly line did a hundred years ago”.
To its credit, Ford was the first auto maker to begin testing driverless technology at the University of Michigan’s faux urban environment, Mcity, and it claims firsts in publicly demonstrating the technology at night and in the snow.
Fields has been leading a strategy to push the company towards a future characterized by advanced mobility, a term describing business ventures organized around a high degree of vehicle sharing and driverless technology.
“Ford has been developing and testing autonomous vehicles for more than 10 years”.
Ford Motor Co. intends to build fully autonomous vehicles without steering wheels or pedals within the next five years, the company announced Tuesday. Ford and Baidu Inc., the Chinese Internet behemoth, announced that both companies jointly invested $150 million in Velodyne, a Silicon Valley company that specializes in sensors.
He described the investment in Velodyne as “a clear sign of our commitment to making autonomous vehicles available for consumers around the world”.
This year, Ford will triple its autonomous vehicle test fleet to be the largest test fleet of any automaker – bringing the number to about 30 self-driving Fusion Hybrid sedans on the roads in Arizona, California and MI, with plans to triple it again next year. The laser sensors are called Lidar, which is short for “light detection and ranging”.
Central to Ford’s plan is a circa $A100 million investment in Velodyne, a tech company that specialises in lidar sensors, along with investment in 3D mapping specialist Civil Maps.
Advertisement
Ford’s global chief Mark Fields made the bold statement overnight from the car-maker’s Silicon Valley-based research centre in the United States.
