The American car giant Ford Motor Company, currently the world’s sixth-largest car manufacturer, on Tuesday committed to having a mass-produced self-driving car within five years. Speaking at the Further with Ford technology conference at the carmaker’s headquarters here at Dearborn outside Detroit, Ford Chief Executive and President Mark Fields said that he was dedicated towards this project for millions of people.
Outside, Ford demonstrated their prototype autonomous vehicle to the world’s media, a project initially born out of a US Defence Department project to make autonomous battlefield vehicles over a decade ago, that people can now drive on public roads.
“We are making people’s lives better by changing how the world moves,” Fields said as he defined Ford not as an automotive company but a “mobility company”.
When asked how ‘old’ companies like the century-old carmaker would compete with the likes of tech giants Alphabet (Google) and Apple, Fields pointed out that Ford and other automobile companies have been better systems integrators than the technology companies. He also pointed out that there were several elements to self-driving technology and that car companies understood the safety-critical aspects of cars better.
However, Fields did add that the biggest change required for ‘self-driving’ cars was not the technology but a change from the attitude of ‘car ownership’ to ‘car sharing’.
Towards this end, Fields mentioned that Ford’s recent purchase of start-up Chariot and the launch of bike-sharing services in San Francisco were steps in this transition to a mobility company.
In India as well, Ford subsidiary Ford Smart Mobility was the largest investor in the latest round of funding for Zoomcar, a low-cost car-rental and sharing service.
Raj Nair, Chief Technical Officer, Ford and the man leading the technical side of the project was very open about the challenges that lay ahead for Ford as they moved forward with autonomous vehicles. “I realise that the optical processors in the front of my head, the auditory sensors on the side and the algorithms running inside my head are still well beyond anything that we have developed. And we take that for granted.”
However, Nair did admit that the progress towards autonomous vehicles over the past few years has been remarkable. “In ride-hailing services the single-biggest cost is that of the driver and we feel that cost can be drastically reduced”, he said but also mentioned that autonomous vehicles might be too expensive for mass personal purchase for a while yet.