Ford tries to catch up to Uber and Google in the driverless car game

Not every self-driving car company is a hi-tech unicorn eager to disrupt the status quo. The latest firm to invite journalists to experience its Autonomous technology is the epitome of traditional car manufacturing: Ford.

On its sprawling campus in Dearborn, Michigan, the century-old company is trying its hardest to look and act like a new startup. In March, Ford launched a subsidiary called Ford Smart Mobility (FSM) to develop in-car connectivity, ride-sharing and autonomous technologies. FSM is designed to compete like a startup, with the aim of translating Ford’s decade of work in autonomous systems into real products.

At its first public autonomous vehicle demos, young engineers and entrepreneurs were enthused about reinventing our traffic-clogged cities.

“We’re rethinking our entire business model,” said Mark Fields, Ford’s CEO. “It’s no longer about how many vehicles we can sell, it’s about what services we can provide. We understand that the world has changed from a mindset of owning vehicles to one of owning and sharing them.”

That has led to some quirky investments, such as Ford’s acquisition last week of a San Francisco-based crowdsharing shuttle bus startup called Chariot, and a partnership to provide the city with thousands of human-powered bikes for a ride-sharing scheme.

But while Ford’s car sales are fairly healthy today, Fields foresees a world transformed by Driverless Cars, Uber and climate change. “You could argue that in major cities, vehicle density will drop because of automated vehicles and congestion charges. Some cities might even outlaw personal use of vehicles.”

One of Ford’s strategies to cope with this is to accelerate its efforts towards a fully autonomous car. Fields now says Ford will have a completely self-driving car, without a steering wheel, an accelerator or pedals, in production by 2021. It will initially be used only for robotic taxi services in restricted urban areas but should be available for consumers to purchase by the middle of the decade.

Ford’s newfound confidence in self-driving cars comes just as the technology’s pioneers are struggling to mature beyond this same gee-whiz enthusiasm. Google’s self-driving project, perennially poised to be spun out into a separate company, recently lost key members, while Apple is rumoured to have laid off dozens of engineers and scaled back its ambitious plans to build its own autonomous vehicle.

Source: AP. Picture: AP

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