Ford is targeting to launch a fully autonomous vehicle by the year 2021. Interestingly, however, they are aiming their efforts towards ride-sharing uses instead of the individual vehicle owners. To this end, they are investing in several technology companies in Silicon Valley, such as LIDAR sensor research firm Velodyne, to tackle this broader transport issue.
Now, these vehicles will indeed be fully autonomous and Ford admits that manual override would not even be possible due to the lack of any controls such as a steering wheel or pedals for a passenger to manipulate.
The American automaker had been previously sharing its strides in autonomous or self-driving cars in recent months and the world assumed it would find its way to the future Fords found in showrooms - which may still be the case. Ford never clarified this before and now we have confirmation that their had much deeper interests in ride-sharing than we thought.
In the span between now and 2021, Ford plans to continue investing in self-driving vehicles. In the nearer term, it will be expanding its research and innovation centre in Palo Alto, California to nearly double its current staff count by the end of 2016.
It’s becoming clearer now that Ford is diverting more and more of its research dollars into developing a robust self-driving system that’s capable of Level 4 autonomy on the road or higher. This means that the vehicle will be fully capable of navigating itself to a destination (that’s within a predefined area), avoid obstacles and generally manage the journey safely without needing human intervention and can respond appropriately to sudden changes or obstructions.
Ken Washington, Ford’s Vice President of Research and Advanced Engineering, said: "In a ride service, you could imagine that the defined environment or area might be large enough to take a customer from a city center to an airport or a seaport. Depending on how much of that environment can you capture in your high resolution map, you can define the area that you’re going to service with the vehicles."
"It will be more expensive,” continued Washington, referring to added cost of sensors and computing power needed to be on-board. “The miles driven are likely to be much higher as well. When you put a vehicle that has the ability to be autonomous into a ride service, it will be designed to operate in a defined environment, managed by the right business who will amortize that asset over many more miles."
Services such as Uber and Lyft will be prime recipients that Ford would want to presumably license this capability to, and time will tell how deeply either will choose to integrate the technology. Rumours have previously surfaced about Ford forming its own ride-sharing service as a potential Plan B. Besides the issue of future partners, a climb that all automakers interested in self-driving cars will have to face is governmental and legislative friction. In the next decade, we will be seeing many carmakers lobby the cause to politicians and courts either individually or as part of consortium.
"We are viewing this just like the core business of selling cars," added Washington. "We stand behind our product. We envision a future ride service having vehicles in it that we engineer and service, and provide a service to our customers."
For more on Ford vehicles, including pricing and specifications, check out our Showroom.
