Ford Announces Plans For Fully Autonomous Cars By 2021
On its website, ABC News (8/16) reports Ford president and CEO Mark Fields explained in a Tuesday blog post that the company “will be mass-producing vehicles capable of driving fully autonomously within five years.” Fields describes the cars as having no steering wheel, no gas pedals, and no brake pedals, and says a driver will not be required. The AP (8/16, Durbin) says that Ford chief technical officer Raj Nair explained that engineers have not successfully determined how to keep semi-autonomous driving car operators engaged and ready to take over the vehicle; thus, Ford opted to skip the semi-autonomous step altogether.
The Washington Post (8/16, Fung) reports that in an interview, Nair also said, “This is not a couple hundred development units in limited use. When we talk about high volume, it’s thousands of units – and sometimes more.” He added, “It’s not just a traditional opportunity of building an automated vehicle, but generating revenue on vehicle miles traveled, it opens up the opportunity for us to offer transportation as a service.”
Reuters (8/16) reports that Ford anticipates a deployment of 30 self-driving Fusion Hybrid prototype models by the end of 2016, and 90 more in 2017. To accomplish its goal, Ford is tripling its investments in semi-autonomous system technologies.
Ford Announces Start-Up Partnerships For Self-Driving Car Initiative. The AP (8/16) says Ford and Chinese search engine Baidu will each individually invest $75 million in Velodyne. The joint investment in Velodyne’s laser sensors will help them both expand design and production and reduce sensor costs. Velodyne president Mike Jellen told USA Today (8/16, Cava) that the joint investment from Ford and Baidu “will allow us to accelerate our push for low-cost, mass produced sensors.”
Analysis: Collaboration Between Car Makers, Tech Companies Accelerating. Business Insider (8/16) examines the growing convergence between auto manufacturers and tech companies and notes that since late 2015, “the density of these collaborations, partnerships, investments, and sometimes outright acquisitions of tech companies by old-school car makers has increased.” The article points to urban residents’ accelerated use of ride-share services like Lyft and Uber and says the emergence of self-driving vehicles is “happening much faster than anyone expected,” prompting car manufacturers to get “aggressive about acquiring and investing on that front.”
As Self-Driving Cars Become A Reality, Carmakers Face Industry Shift. In an article by the Detroit News (8/16), Kelley Blue Book analyst Karl Brauer said that the car manufacturing industry is encountering “a philosophical fork in the road,” because while a gradual transition to fully-automated self-driving cars grants manufacturers the opportunity to learn from mistakes, “Some could argue it’s not worth the resource investment versus targeting [fully autonomous] from the start.”
UBER to Use Driverless Cars in Pittsburg Within Weeks
The Los Angeles Times (8/18, Mitchell, Lien) says a fleet of Fords and Volvos “is fully equipped and ready to hit the streets of Pittsburgh within weeks.” Uber Chief Executive Travis Kalanick said in a blog post Thursday that “Uber is accelerating its plan to replace its 1 million human drivers with robots as quickly as possible.” U.S. News & World Report (8/18) also reports saying the company’s Pittsburgh fleet “will be supervised by humans in the driver’s seat at first, and will be made up of modified Volvo XC90 sport-utility vehicles, according to Bloomberg.”
NYTimes To Lawmakers: Millions Of American Jobs At Stake. The New York Times (8/18, Allison, Subscription Publication) reports Uber is “steering its driverless vehicle technology toward a crash between robots and jobs.” The Times says putting robots instead of humans at the wheel “could save lives, but it would automate a task that employs millions of American workers.” The Times warns policy makers and politicians that “America’s safety net is ill-prepared for such a job-destroying juggernaut.”
Kalahari: Self-Driving Cars Will Double Number Of Human Drivers. Business Insider (8/18, Carson) says Kalanick predicts self-driving cars will increase jobs for human drivers. He expects that as the number of active cars increases, which he says could go from 30,000 to a million in some cities, you will have less workers per car but more workers overall. He says that when you increase the number of active cars “to a million cars, you’re still going to need a human-driven parallel...because there are just places that autonomous cars are just not going to be able to go or conditions they’re not going to be able to handle.” Kalanick says he “can imagine” a city with 30,000 active drivers increasing to “50,000 to 100,000 drivers, human drivers, alongside a million car network.”
Volvo, Uber to Jointly Develop Autonomous SUVs. According to the Wall Street Journal (8/18, Stoll, Subscription Publication), Volvo and Uber have entered a $300 million deal to develop autonomous SUVs to either use as self-driving taxis or sell to consumers. Volvo will use a preexisting platform for initial engineering, then both companies will use that technology to each develop a self-driving system. Reuters (8/18) characterizes the deal as the “latest move by traditional vehicle manufacturers to team up with Silicon Valley firms long seen as disruptive threats to their industry.” Reuters adds that the investment “will be roughly shared equally by the two companies” and will go towards “researching and developing both hardware, such as sensors used to detect traffic and obstacles, as well as software for the self driving cars.”
Article provided by the National Association of Manufacturers