Ford Entering the Race of Self-Driving Cars
In the race of developing fully autonomous vehicles, several renowned automobile manufacturers around the world are speeding up their work and research to produce vehicles that have the ability of piloting themselves on public roads and highways, while others have seemingly highlighted plans about expanding their development fleets to include a range of electric, autonomous vehicles. However, only few automakers have gone so far as to give a definite date for the commercial debut of their cars.
Among these few include Ford Motors, which although has entered the autonomous race quite late, seems to have the most potential of introducing cars that go the extra mile in providing the utmost convenience and efficiency to passengers. Introducing plans to build a fully autonomous vehicle that will be commercially available without pedals or a steering wheel, Ford’s new driverless car will even be aimed at ride-sharing and ride-hailing fleets.
In order to achieve this success, Ford is working with a number of startup technology companies. The brand has acquired SAIPS an Israeli company that has the ability of producing machine learning software and computer vision with the help of “virtual retina” technology produced by “Nirenberg Neuroscience”. The brand has also partnered with LIDAR, a firm that focuses its work around sensors and monitoring devices that function in real-time and have the capability of reading data in milliseconds.
In addition to partnering and acquiring with various technology companies, Ford Motors has even expanded its innovation and research center in Palo Alto with hopes to double the size of its size by the end of next year to boost the production of its fully autonomous vehicle without steering wheel or pedals. Although the company has not yet revealed a concept for its autonomous vehicle, according to rumors Ford is planning to keep things on the low and suddenly hit the markets with something unique.
In fact, the executives working on the fully autonomous vehicle project have simply denied showing a glimpse of the vehicle or even talk about what it might look like. For now, they have just released vivid details regarding what software and hardware they will have ready for their driverless machine. The main goal of Ford Motors is to build a vehicle to the SAE Level 4 standard of automation. For those of you who aren’t aware of what this means, in simple words, it gives the car the ability to handle all aspects of driving, while being limited to certain approved regions or areas.
For instance, Ford’s autonomous vehicle will only be able to function on the Island of Manhattan. Anything beyond that and the car will not be able to operate, perhaps unless you pay for certain approved routes outside the Manhattan region. This makes their task easier to build a car that handles every possible driving situation, as vehicles will only be driving autonomously in areas where high-resolution mapping data is present. So, when does Ford plan on selling its autonomous fleet? According to a report from The Verge, Ford’s autonomous fleet will be ready by 2021.
