Gestation before prime time may take up to 10 to 15 years.
We all knew that at some point, self-driving cars would be ubiquitous. Same story for electric cars, or at least vehicles that were powered by some other form of energy than the combustible chemistry stored in fossil fuels.
One automaker that’s investing quite heavily in this future is Ford, looking into many possible solutions to this problem. And the VP of research and engineering at the Blue Oval’s autonomous skunkworks, Ken Washington, told Autonews that based on how things are progressing, the earliest we can expect to find a car we can buy that’s capable of full autonomy is the year 2026.
‘Autonomous cars’, to those who aren’t familiar, is a term that’s quite liberally thrown around despite how far we are from a realised product. However, the assumption for autonomous cars would be that it’s able to drive itself in all (or nearly all) normal conditions, not needing human intervention at all.
This is what is called Level 4 autonomy, a car that’s so capable of manoeuvring itself that it may not even need a steering wheel or foot pedals. Ford wishes to only introduce its autonomous cars to private buyers when the technology, which will rely heavily on machine learning, has matured to this level - at least, that’s their current position.
Ford recently acquired Argo AI for roughly 1 billion US Dollars to increase the braintrust within the company that has the required expertise in this field. Silicon Valley companies such as Google, Apple, and Uber are also racing toward the same horizon, but Ford is reasonably confident that they would need a collaborative relationship with an automaker to really bridge this chasm.
Preceding that 2026 rough estimate would be a series of test runs that involve ride-sharing services in more controlled urban environments other fleet applications to iron out the teething issues that will inevitably crop up in this nascent stages. How prior? Washington expects a 5 to 10 year period would be needed before the technology and infrastructure are fool-proof enough to put into the hands of Mr Joe Blow.
“It’s really hard to guess and predict the pace of the technology,” he adds, “Our current view is the adoption rates will be relatively gradual, […] This is something we’re going to make happen, and others will, too.”
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