Ford Gets in the Driverless Car Game
By Alex Batty, MHI Marketing Communications Coordinator |@mhi_alex
It seems everyone is trying to get on top of driverless vehicle autonomy. We recently posted about Uber’s acquisition of Otto, which you can read here, but it turns out that Ford is also working toward driverless cars.
They announced that they planned to deploy fully autonomous ride-hailing cars by 2021, perhaps as a direct response to Uber’s popularity and move to go autonomous. Ford’s version would look similar to Google’s removing the steering wheel and pedals completely. The goal is to reach Level 4 automation as determined by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE).
There are six total levels. The first three, 0 – no automation, 1 – driver assistance, and 2 – partial automation, require part time performance of driving tasks by a human driver. Three through five shifts more of the driving tasks to automation, with 3 (conditional automation) requiring a human driver to intervene in certain situations, 4 (high automation) putting most of the driving on the system, and 5 (full automation) taking care of all driving tasks unconditionally. For more on the SAE’s automation standards visit http://www.sae.org/misc/pdfs/automated_driving.pdf
As part of Ford’s driverless car plan, they’ve been investing heavily in technology companies that fit with this mission. Technologies like lasers and mapping, which will ultimately guide the vehicle. Ford envisions the vehicles being used in dense urban areas because Level 4 automation gives full autonomy, hence not needing the wheel and pedals, but requires a heavily mapped, geo-fenced area.
With so many companies jumping on the bandwagon in the quest for driverless vehicles, it looks like that’s the next big thing that’s going to be coming in this field. It’ll be interesting to see how different companies try to differentiate the technology in order to compete with one another. Any way it washes out, it should lead to good things for technology in general, but everything keeps ramping up at an exponential rate.
With the accelerated change that keeps happening in our world, it’s important to learn how to stay on top of things as well as adapt them to our industry and companies. The 2016 MHI Annual Conference and Executive Summit will address this accelerated change and bring people together to workshop how to continue to move forward and keep up with the break-neck speed of change. To learn more visit mhi.org/conference and mhi.org/summit to register today.
