Ford Motor Company wants to be a leader in autonomous vehicles, and will put some on the road soon. The video will appear momentarily.
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“Just think about the things that you could do when there is no need to drive the auto”. And they’ll ask, “What’s Facebook?” The auto steers itself along straight and curved roads, heeds stops signs and traffic lights, yields to oncoming traffic when turning left, and waits for pedestrians to cross the road.
“With highway routes you don’t have a lot of intersecting streets, pedestrians or cars”, McBride said.
Another of Ford’s investments, which is meant to further the autonomous cars’ 3D mapping capabilities, is in a Berkeley-based company called Civil Maps.
Ford Motor Company [NYSE:F] recently announced it will launch a fully autonomous vehicle in five years.
Among the other activities, there’s an exciting seminar on industry trends and another with Bill Ford and Mark Fields, Ford’s executive chairman and president, respectively.
Ford said it is fortifying its core business, building on leadership in trucks, vans, commercial and performance vehicles, growing utility vehicles and transforming underperforming areas, including luxury, small vehicles and emerging markets.
With its new ventures, and particularly its self-driving projects, Ford aims to integrate their centennial knowledge and excellence in vehicle-making with state-of-the-art technology in an affordable quality product for the next decade. I think, from our standpoint, in our company we use the phrase “fun to drive”.
Towards this end, Fields mentioned that Ford’s recent purchase of start-up Chariot and the launch of bike-sharing services in San Francisco were steps in this transition to a mobility company. Totally driverless, there will be no steering wheels or floor pedals. As the Ford Fusion hybrid vehicle navigated the semi-public roads of Ford’s campus it was a model cautious driver, letting other cars take the lead and waiting for a crossing signal to stop flashing even though the pedestrian had long-since finished crossing the road. It’s just that this time, we’re going to drive a self-driving Ford, which begs the question: is “drive” really the right word for what we’re going to do?
The experimental cars were roof-equipped with lidar, laser emitting sensors that can expand the object-detection capabilities of the optical cameras and radar more common on high-end automobiles today.
But the technology has advanced greatly in just the past year. Each vehicle in Ford’s fleet, now numbering just 10, is equipped with four LiDAR sensors that bounce light off the car’s surroundings to build a 3D map tracking the movement of objects within an 80-metre radius. That suggests that on the interstate, if you don’t have option “go with the traffic flow”, you’ll be passed by most everyone on the road and occasionally flipped off by drivers with places to be.
“It’s hard, but it’s also a lot of fun”, Fields said.
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“We’ve had “feet-off” technology in the shape of basic cruise control for decades and the arrival of radar cruise is a development that is now becoming available on mainstream fleet cars”.
