Ford has laid the gauntlet as far as autonomous driving technology is concerned after announcing a 2021 hard date on its plan to roll out fully autonomous vehicles without a steering wheel or pedals. It’s a bold move that circumvents the self-assisted driving technology that other firms like Tesla are doing, but the Blue Oval seems confident in its abilities and resources to have these vehicles out in five years for ride-hailing and ride-sharing purposes.
So while it still represents a big leap from self-assisted driving technology, Ford isn’t going for all the marbles in offering consumers a fully autonomous vehicle. That’s still part of the company’s plan in the long run, but over the short term, the objective is to expose its autonomous driving cars to the ride-sharing industry. A big part of that plan is develop vehicles that meet the SAE Level 4 standard of automation, which provide cars with abilities to handle all aspects of driving by itself that’s limited to a specific set of approved areas or regions. That setup works perfectly with ride-sharing companies like Uber, which, from the looks of it, will be one of the automaker’s target markets.
Ken Washington, Ford’s VP of Research and Advanced Engineering, explained the company’s rationale to The Verge, saying that “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."
In a lot of ways, Ford’s strategy is not unlike what General Motors is doing. The General has also announced plans to develop autonomous driving cars for commercial services. Tech giant Google is in on the same boat as it already has a test car with no steering wheels and pedals. Even Uber, presumably one of Ford’s future clients for its autonomous driving vehicles, is developing its own technology for the same exact purpose.
Only time will tell if Ford can live up to its set timetable but given how the industry itself has evolved into making autonomous driving technology its own top priority, we can all be sure that Blue Oval will have all hands on deck to get its technology up and running by 2021.
Continue after the jump to read the full story.
from Top Speed http://ift.tt/2aZwrYM
via IFTTT
0 comments:
Post a Comment