A sudden flurry of news in the autonomous car market drew major headlines this week, with one of the most prominent being Ford Motor Company's pledge to have a fully autonomous vehicle by 2021, as the Detroit Free Press reports:
[Ford CEO Mark] Fields compared the advent of self-driving technology as a watershed moment for Ford and the automotive industry.
He — along with many others — believes that consumers will eagerly embrace autonomous vehicles and that self-driving cars have the potential to dramatically reduce accidents, congestion and pollution.
Fields also cast Ford’s mission to develop fully autonomous vehicles as directly in line with Henry Ford’s vision of making cars that are affordable and accessible to middle-class people and therefore benefiting society by making travel easier.
Ford’s vision for autonomous vehicles is to make an entirely new vehicle without a steering wheel, without a gas pedal and without a brake pedal, echoing an approach that has been used by Google’s Self-Driving Car Project.
Because of the initial cost, Nair said the vehicle will be aimed first at ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft that will be able to lower their operational costs by providing taxi services without a driver. Still, over time, the vehicle will be aimed at individual customers.
Ford is making massive investments in talent, office space and partnerships in order to meet its self-imposed 2021 deadline, including by doubling its technical research staff for autonomous vehicles to 260, according to the Free Press. It has also acquired an Israeli machine learning company; made an investment in laser radar developer Velodyne, is licensing AI software from Nirenberg Neuroscience; and is investing in 3-D mapping company Civil Maps.
The automaker's announcement was just one of several regarding autonomous vehicles this week. Uber had two, saying it had acquired autonomous trucking startup Otto and also revealing plans to roll out its first fleet of autonomous vehicles. (The modified Volvo SUVs will still have human drivers as backups.)
Analysis: Autonomous Vehicle Exuberance Overshadows Tough Infrastructure Challenges
Amid all the hype, something crucial is often missing from the autonomous vehicle conversation, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland.
"The manufacturers keep the story focused on their product," he says. "If you think of one car traveling in one direction on a freeway, it's a kind of a one-dimensional aspect of the entire driving experience. The three-dimensional aspect is in city center or crowded urban environments, where there are many complex features to interact with including a multiplicity of cars, traffic lights, roadside signals and so on."
Mercedes-Benz recently took on this reality with its Future Bus prototype, which traversed a 12-mile route through the crowded streets of Amsterdam. The automaker is going to continue testing and refining the Future Bus's capabilities with plans to add them to other vehicle lines over time.
The bus uses a mixture of IoT technologies, including a 3G telecom link that continually reports its position and LoRa networking for operational event reporting. But the bus also has a NFC (near field communication) system that allows it to interact with traffic lights and "intelligent" bus stops. This last capability is what completes the puzzle for autonomous vehicles at scale, Mulholland says.
"Taking this example to the next level, think of a fleet of such buses operating in the high-traffic urban and city environment," he says. "There is a need to combine all transportation elements in a complex integrated operating environment that ultimately will go beyond just the buses. Individual trains, buses, taxis and cars will need to interact dynamically and continuously as they traverse the crowded, busy city infrastructure."
"The move to driverless is not only about the car you buy to operate, it's about the interaction with the environment you will drive in and the extent the infrastructure can intelligently interoperate," Mulholland adds. "Smart cities will need to invest in intelligent infrastructure, and in the longer term there will need to be similar investments in the whole road infrastructure to create an IoT infrastructure to accommodate the future."
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