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RPM TV Website | March 24, 2024

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Ford investing heavily in autonomous tech

2015 Ford Focus Hatchback
Adam Schoeman

Ford Motor Company is apparently shifting a large portion of its R&D budget into autonomous driving projects. The US auto maker is said to be running a fleet of 30 autonomous vehicles, with operation under adverse weather part of the evaluation process.

At the heart of the Blue Oval’s self-driving fleet is an ultra-high resolution 3D map. The map details landmarks, road signs, buildings, markings, geography and topography and uses them to identify where in the world the car is. Other autonomous vehicles use cameras and GPS to fulfil this requirement, but Ford says its system will work even if a road sign is covered in snow, making it unreadable.

By plugging the car’s self-driving systems into the weather, it will also be able to decide if autonomous driving is too dangerous, causing it to relinquish control to the driver.

Autonomous driving is hardly new: Google has already achieved impressive results after extensively testing its fully unmanned vehicle. Even some of the luxury vehicles that we have driven recently can use radar cruise control and lane departure warning systems to drive themselves.

What is noteworthy about this technology is that it will be built into Ford’s mass-market offering. Ford has a product strategy that is global, meaning it tries to release every vehicle it makes into every market it’s active in. Globalisation allows more efficient amortisation of research expenses, while also lowering individual costs by reducing deviations from a factory specification.

Ford has also just opened a research lab that will focus on pairing vehicle systems and wearable tech. The idea is that if the car has access to the data produced by your wearable, such as your heart rate and sleep patterns, it can incorporate that information into its warning systems.

For example, if the car knows that you did not have enough sleep last night, it can be more aggressive when firing a lane departure warning.

Other innovations being pursued by the Blue Oval include expanding a service called Ford Pass which will serve as a kind of App Store for their cars — similar to what iTunes is for the iPhone — and models that will allow a group of people (like neighbours) to lease a car between them if they all car pool together.

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