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Ford Plans a Fleet of Fully Autonomous Cars Operating in a Ride-Hail Service By 2021 (recode.net) 101

Posted by msmash from the autonomous-future dept.
Ford will mass-produce autonomous vehicles without steering wheels by 2021, Ford chief executive Mark Fields said today at the Ford Research and Innovation Center in Palo Alto, California. Recode reports:Fields announced that the company is working toward launching a fleet of commercial, level 4 (one level below a completely autonomous system, in which drivers don't have to be engaged) vehicles in a ride-hail service by 2021. The details of that ride-hail service -- such as which company Ford will partner with to operate it -- still haven't been determined. As part of that effort, Ford is investing in Velodyne, a self-driving tech company, and is working with three other startups. Ford has acquired Israel-based computer vision and machine learning company SAIPS, struck up an exclusive licensing agreement with machine vision company Nirenberg Neuroscience LLC and, as previously announced, invested in 3-D mapping startup Civil Maps.
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Ford Plans a Fleet of Fully Autonomous Cars Operating in a Ride-Hail Service By 2021 More

Ford Plans a Fleet of Fully Autonomous Cars Operating in a Ride-Hail Service By 2021

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  • subject (Score:4, Funny)

    by Sowelu ( 713889 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @02:58PM (#52714709)

    Thank you for choosing Johnny Cab

  • Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @03:07PM (#52714797)

    Your Car in the Cloud.

    Makes sense given the sentiment everyone seems to have about not owning anything these days. Renting living space is way up, companies aren't buying their own computers and data centers anymore, companies don't even own their own core assets like buildings and office furniture. Everything is a creaky tower of outsourcing from the coffee pots to the building management systems.

    I'd actually be happier if Ford ended up doing this first instead of Google. I love the idea of a self-driving car, but don't really like the idea of Google having full access to yet another facet of everyone's lives.

    • Re:Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)

      by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @03:49PM (#52715201) Journal
      Sometimes it just makes sense. Leasing instead of owning means you have a lot more flexibility, your capital isn't tied up, and if you lease something that turns out to be not to your liking, your headache will be an organisational rather than a financial one. My brother's small company actually owned their office but had to move to something larger, and then that office turned into a financial millstone around their necks (try selling any office space in this area post 2008, ha ha). Same happens with people who have to move for whatever reason (or worse: go through a divorce) and need to sell their house, but can't.

      In the long run, owning is cheaper and you can do whatever you want to your property, but in a lot of cases that freedom isn't very important to people or companies. And when it comes to cars, I suspect that it will be a lot cheaper to rent an autonomous car instead of owning one in case that (second) car is not used daily. There is some convenience to owning a car; you can leave your crap in there and have it as dirty or clean as you want, it's always there to be used at a moment's notice. But if you're not using it every day anyway, who cares?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        There is some convenience to owning a car; you can leave your crap in there and have it as dirty or clean as you want, it's always there to be used at a moment's notice. But if you're not using it every day anyway, who cares?

        Well it's also available during crunch times like Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and so on. The airplanes are full, the trains are full, the buses are full and if autonomous cars are profit-optimized for normal traffic you can be sure they are full too so short term leases might not be available when you need them. As for long term leases, unlike a house or office building cars are mobile if Detroit goes to hell you can always sell it in New York, California or some 40+ other states. If the whole economy f

    • I'd actually be happier if Ford ended up doing this first instead of Google. I love the idea of a self-driving car, but don't really like the idea of Google having full access to yet another facet of everyone's lives.

      Well, I'm delighted to inform you that I have some bad news for you! [yahoo.com]

      Google and Ford will create a joint venture to build self-driving vehicles with Google’s technology, a huge step by both companies toward a new business of automated ride sharing,

      It's not Ford doing this, it's Google and Ford. ;)

    • I'd actually be happier if Ford ended up doing this first instead of Google. I love the idea of a self-driving car, but don't really like the idea of Google having full access to yet another facet of everyone's lives.

      I don't either, but I also don't like the idea of latest product offering being 20 year old tech. Seriously, car manufactures were still selling cars with cassette players in them only a few years ago, and most still don't offer Bluetooth as standard today. A car is just technology, it needs to be run by technology-minded companies.

  • It won't be too long after such driverless 'services' are implemented when the organs of state security and corporations (but I repeat myself) will run real-time scans on a customers' finances; any found debts, back taxes, or warrants (real and imagined) will alter their 'final destination' to debtors' prison.



    What? It was all there in the half-point font EULA.

    • and will rundown people on the FBI wanted list. No court for you just death without the cost of a trail

    • So when this happens, do the doors lock, steel panels roll over all windows including the windshield, and the seatbelt release button disables Cause, I would bail out, and if I have to, I will smash everything inside of the car to do so.

  • In olden days. (Score:5, Funny)

    by OzPeter ( 195038 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @03:31PM (#52715013)

    (This is not totally all my comment, but based on something I saw on CL of all places)

    In olden days when someone was driving their car and had a heart attack and died, the car would veer off the road and just crash. But instead in the age of driverless cars that dead body is simply going to be served up at the destination, albeit somewhat ripe.

    Imagine the fun when little Johnny runs out to greet the car that brought his dear granddad to Johnny's birthday party!

    • In the future the car will recognize the occupant died, and text the person they were driving to with the message "Sorry, died en route, not coming today. :-(" then drive them to a morgue.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by BenBoy ( 615230 )
      " ... The route recalculation is complete; proceeding to the nearest Google coroner-partner."
      Easy peasy; it's all in the TOS for which you clicked "OK" at the beginning of the trip.
    • No the car will recognize that the passenger's heart is in fibrillation and will redirect to the nearest medical facility while pinging the medical facility about the condition, the police about the emergency and the surrounding traffic to notify that it is going to be exceeding normal traffic flow behaviors. Thus instead of dying and either ruining a birthday or killing someone else when the car crashes, Grandfather instead is delivered to a nearby urgent care facility just as a doctor rushes out the door

  • Ford: Sued out of existence... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @03:44PM (#52715161)

    ... Introduce cars passengers can't control in 2021, see them crushed by insurance lawsuits in 2022. Unless, of course, they can totally change liability law before that.

  • Is on a closed circuit loop, e.g. between airport terminals and hotels, or convention centre buildings. The roads can be dedicated and one-way, the cars don't have to drive fast and there can be some guy in a booth to take over if the system breaks down.

  • It's a serious question.

    • Do you have any evidence that their traffic ticket revenue exceeds their budget for traffic enforcement?

      Fuel, wear and tear on the cars, high-speed runs out to crash sites, multiple officers required to route traffic around crash sites, etc.

      Add to that the administrative overhead of tickets. Sending the summons, processing it through the court system, even getting paid costs money.

      Every cop I know would love to not have to walk up on a depreciation, bodies burned in a fire, or child death from an automobile

    • Hire less police officers?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by b0bby ( 201198 )

        This is my hope - that there will be less cops overall, and less opportunities for people to get pulled over for driving while black and other nonsense which happens all too frequently.

  • We have all these promises of what AI is going to accomplish (here's an explanation of driverless levels [techrepublic.com], level 4 means you'll be able to sleep in the back seat of the car. Our technology isn't close to that point yet). Even if driverless technology existed at that level right now (it doesn't), it would still take them a couple years of engineering before everything worked well enough to release.

    But with all these promises, if they aren't delivered, there could easily be another AI backlash into winter.

  • Actually, in the course of asking this question, I found my own answer and will share with others.

    The NHTSA has levels 0 through 4, with 0 being fully driver-controlled (not even ABS, which is level 1) and level 4 being fully computer-controlled.

    The SAE uses levels 0 through 5. Level 4 is:

    The automated system can control the vehicle in all but a few environments such as severe weather. The driver must enable the automated system only when it is safe to do so. When enabled, driver attention is not required.

    So, I suppose this means that during bad weather, the service would be unavailable.

    • Sounds like: weather so bad that it's not a good idea to go out on the road in the first place.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by b0bby ( 201198 )

      I think this also means that the cars will be restricted to certain areas where they have high quality 3d mapping. The example I read was taxis in Manhattan; they might be restricted to Manhattan, plus a couple of defined routes to the airports etc.

  • Death and slower traffic for all!

    Driving is harder and more "quirky" than any computer will ever be able to comprehend. Don't believe me? The best computers on the planet, after countless revisions and countless years of testing (i.e., our brains), still aren't perfect when it comes to the task. It is comical to me to see engineers again believe they are "more clever" and will overcome everything if enough tech. is thrown at it. Mark my words, this will be a slow-motion clogging of our roadways as suc

  • FMC is smoking crack (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kheldan ( 1460303 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @04:44PM (#52715661) Journal
    In 5 years we still won't have 'fully autonomous, self-driving' cars, they'll still be full of bugs and flaws, and there's no fucking way I'd step into one and have no manual control over direction and speed.

    * * * DO NOT WANT !!! * * *
    • It may be possible to run a fleet of not-yet-ready-for-prime-time autonomous cars along a few restricted routes and not in bad weather. Fewer unknowns to deal with.

    • Yes, you may want to think that this announcement comes from the Ford engineering department as the result of solving a number of intractable problems related to autonomous vehicles.

      Sorry. It's from the marketing department. Nothing has been solved, but the important thing is that even before Slashdot got hold of the story, many others did. The name Ford has again been associated with headlines which will make Ford owners feel good, and Ford investors will be happy. It's 'obviously' not just marketing hype

    • In 5 years we still won't have 'fully autonomous, self-driving' cars, they'll still be full of bugs and flaws,

      Well, gotta agree in part but in part only.

      I'm quite confident that by the time fully autonomous cars are released for sale to the general public (or for use as automated taxi service carrying passengers) they'll be a lot safer already than the average human driven car.

      Why? Because it's in the companies' interest. They have to prove their worth, everybody is very skeptical about cars being able to drive themselves safely, so every single accident will be all over the news (just look at Tesla's autopilot cra

      • they'll be a lot safer already than the average human driven car

        Still don't want one and I wouldn't step into one that doesn't have a full set of manual controls for a human driver who can take control of the vehicle on a moments notice. Luckily for me it won't likely be in my lifetime that they'll allow anything on the road for which 'self driving' means anything more than 'sophisticated autopilot' and all cars will still have a full set of controls for a human driver. Again: DO NOT WANT. IDGAF how safe anyone claims they'll be, DO NOT WANT. I work in high tech, I know

        • Let the accident statistics speak for themselves, and see what happens. I for one would be happy to see all those incompetent human drivers off the road, would make traffic a lot safer and predictable.

          • Have current taxis taken them off the road? No, and neither will this.

          • Here's the thing: As strange as it sounds? I'd much rather be the victim of an automobile accident that a human driver is responsible for, rather than some damned piece of software, because the manufacturer of the vehicle at fault will ultimately be who is sued over it -- and they'll lawyer the hell up way more than I ever could, and ultimately I'll get no justice. You can't put a piece of software on a witness stand in a civil or criminal trial; they'll claim "Oh, our software is thoroughly tested to Feder

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sstrick ( 137546 )

      Do they have to make them flawless? Or just better then the average human driver who is also buggy and unpredictable.

  • More than any other change in the car industry, autonomous taxi services would make things massively better. Once you make it cheaper and more convenient for most people to use the taxi service than to own your own car, then:

    You can customize your car to the journey. One-person 3km trip? Hail a short-range one-person electric car. No need to drive a big car just because you need it once in a while. This leads to a massive reduction in average vehicle size on the roads, and big reductions in energy consumpti

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tomhath ( 637240 )

      Once you make it cheaper and more convenient

      It'll never be more convenient than using your own car or calling a taxi driven by a real person.

      Cheaper? That depends on how often it's used. Outside of college campuses and urban areas, people use their cars a couple of times a day; it'll be a challenge for this to be useful by commuters because of the sheer number of vehicles that have to be available for a couple of hours each day, then sitting idle the rest of the day. Sounds like a niche that replaces Uber to me.

      • People will likely use it a lot less than they use their own cars now. Instead of taking a car for that 1 km ride to the supermarket, they'd walk or take a bike. Many short trips would simply not be done by car, but by other means.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by roca ( 43122 )

        Owning my own car isn't all that convenient. I have to have it serviced. I have to refuel it. It's not always the ideal model for the task at hand. Every so often I have the hellish experience of buying another one. I have to juggle usage with other family members (or spend significantly more money for another vehicle that'll be less used).

        Autonomous taxis would be more convenient than taxis driven by real people simply because you could afford to have a lot more of them on the road.

        Even in rush hour, it wo

  • ....when you are in one of these steeringwheelless cars, and a carload of gangbangers pulls up to you wanting to rob/rape/murder you? No steeringwheel = no chance for evasive maneuvers.
  • "General Motors announced in 2005 that it expects it could have a self-driving car that could pilot itself in heavy traffic at a speed of up to 60 mph in production by 2008." From: http://www.elon.edu/docs/e-web... [elon.edu]

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