Skip to main content

Ford Plans Self-Driving Cars By 2021


Automotive giant Ford has outlined its plans to manufacture a fleet of driverless, autonomous cars by 2021. The cars would be supplied to ride-sharing services such as Lyft and Uber, which are themselves working on autonomous driving technologies.





The plans were announced this week by Ford CEO Mark Fields, who said he wants to double the amount of investment in the company’s Silicon Valley research centres.

While Ford has been working on self-driving car technologies for the better part of a decade, this is the first occasion the company has announced a release date for autonomous vehicles.


No steering wheels

The cars will be free of a steering wheel and pedals, and will initially be used exclusively in the ride-sharing market, rather than offered to consumers.


“There’s a real business rationale for this,” said Fields, as reported by the Financial Times.

“Vehicle autonomy could have as big an impact on society as the Ford mass assembly line had over 100 years ago.”

But Ford will be fighting in a competitive market. Google has already been actively testing its self-driving cars on Californian roads, and BMW and Apple are also gearing up for autonomous automobiles.

In the UK, Jaguar Land Rover said it is to start testing self-driving cars on British roads, and plans to roll out a fleet of more than 100 research vehicles by 2020.

The company plans to roll out the first of the test vehicles by as early as the end of this year, and will test them on a 41-mile route close to its headquarters in Coventry. The route consists of motorways and urban roads.

Competition

However, Ford believes a number of investments can give it the edge, with the company ploughing money alongside China’s Baidu into Velodyne, a company that makes laser-based guidance technology. Ford has also purchased Israel’s SAIPS, a machine learning startup.

Earlier this year, Ford also invested in cloud company Pivotal, which already works with Ford on a number of smart car projects. Ford uses Pivotal’s Big Data Suite in its connected vehicle platforms, and Ford’s FordPass, which allows drivers to monitor their cars from a mobile app, is also built on Pivotal Software’s technology. The company has also aligned with Google to help lobby the US government to produce ‘rules of the road’ for autonomous vehicles.

Ford said that it will begin road tests in Arizona and California by 2017.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Security Alert; Bart Ransomware Bypasses Corporate Firewalls

A new ransomware variant has emerged that’s similar to widespread threats such as Dridex 220 and Locky Affid=3, but uses a security-evading technique that may allow it to attack organisations protected from other malware, according to computer security researchers. Ransomware has spread quickly in the last few months, as a number of payouts have attracted cyber-criminals to the technique.
Post a Comment
Read more

Floods Leave Many Dead in Southern Ghana

Four days of heavy and steady rain has left at least 10 people dead in the south of Ghana. The streets of Accra have been left under water after the torrential downpours caused widespread flooding earlier this week. The nation's capital was hit bit 185mm of rain on Sunday, which is more than they would expect for the entire month of June. This is the wettest month of the year with an average rainfall of 178mm. Since the weekend a further 50mm of rain has fallen exacerbating the severe problems already faced. President John Dramani Mahama has surveyed the areas concerned. He was reported to have driven through several neighbourhoods on a motorcycle. Heavy downpours were also recorded 150km to the west of Accra in the Central Regional capital, Cape Coast where 10 people died in floods,  Sandy Amartey, regional coordinator of the National Disaster Management organisation, told AFP. "In all we have 10 to 12 who lost their lives during this rainy season." The rain...
Post a Comment
Read more

EC Slaps Apple With £11bn Irish Tax Bill

The European Commission (EC), as expected, has ordered the Irish government to recover up to €13 billion (£11bn) plus interest in “illegal tax benefits”. An investigation found Apple had been able to avoid taxation on almost all profits generated in the EU single market thanks to a structure which routed revenues through two “paper” headquarters in Ireland and minimal tax rates in the country. The EC says Apple only paid an effective corporate tax rate that fell from one percent in 2003 to 0.005 percent in 2014 – a rate which other companies in Ireland were not subjected to. This effectively amounted to state aid, the commission said. Apple tax amazon“Member States cannot give tax benefits to selected companies – this is illegal under EU state aid rules,” said Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who is in charge of competition policy. “The Commission’s investigation concluded that Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than ...
Post a Comment
Read more