Ford Plans To Spend $4 Billion On Autonomous Vehicles By 2023 (techcrunch.com) 55
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Ford Motor plans to spend $4 billion through 2023 in a newly created LLC dedicated to building out an autonomous vehicles business. The automaker announced Tuesday it has created Ford Autonomous Vehicles LLC, which will house the company's self-driving systems integration, autonomous-vehicle research and advanced engineering, AV transportation-as-a-service network development, user experience, business strategy and business development teams. The $4 billion spending plan includes a $1 billion investment in startup Argo AI. The new LLC will be primarily based at Ford's Corktown campus in Detroit and will hold Ford's ownership stake in Argo AI, the company's Pittsburgh-based partner for self-driving system development.
Compare Tesla total R&D on cars, batteries, au (Score:5, Interesting)
For scale, that's similar to Tesla's total R&D budget on everything (batteries, motors, the overall car, autopilot, etc). It represents about 12% of Ford's total R&D.
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True, but now that Ford have publicly committed to tossing that amount down the toilet, it will give smaller companies a better chance at competing.
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I don't think it is really an apples-to-apples comparison though; what Ford calls R&D is generally heavily focused on development rather than research, and is done so for tax treatment.
Ford likely needs to spend significantly more to actually develop a marketable product from this investment.
Tesla R&D "how to run an assembly line". 1913 (Score:2)
On the other hand, Ford's R&D each year builds on all the R&D they've done over the last 115 years.
Elon Musk said their production was slowed because they are trying to figure out how to run an assembly line. They bought machines that were slower than doing it by hand, so they had to throw the machines away. Tesla is trying to figure out how you organize a line to produce 5,000 cars / week, Ford was doing that in 1913. Which puts Ford 105 years ahead of Tesla on the "how to make cars" thing, which
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Also, the "fluffbot" you're obviously referring to was just for one single
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> only reason Ford was able to keep attract enough replacement workers was by paying them well above industry average salaries
On Payscale.com I see that Tesla pays above industry average. :)
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40 years from now when/if autonomous cars finally become a widespread thing, one day some drunk asshole in a beat-up 2029 F150 will pass out at the wheel and mow down a crowd of pedestrians, and a 70-pound teenage bystander named Havid Dogg will wage a media war to get human-powered cars banned once and for all.
Relax dude, no one is taking your guns away.
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I"m really surprised at the number of slashdotters who are into this self driving car thing when they have seen first hand how unreliable and fucking stupid Computers/Software can be.
How much money has Microsoft spent on Windows?
How many times do you have to restart it during the day?
That's your self driving car.
No Thanks.
"It will never work"
- Rocky the Squirrel from Rocky and Bullwinkle
Re:Detroit? (Score:5, Funny)
Just go full Bolt (Score:2)
Get S Korea to do the battery, motor, and drive unit.
Add a pretty GUI.
Motor Trend car of the year (Score:3)
I see the Bolt is Motor Trend's car of the year. I also notice it's currently outselling Tesla. I think this article is about autonomous vehicles, though.
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I see the Bolt is Motor Trend's car of the year. I also notice it's currently outselling Tesla. I think this article is about autonomous vehicles, though.
I like the Bolt, but it's not even close to outselling Tesla. They are selling around 1000-1500 a month since January - Tesla sold 1800 Model 3s alone in January, and they'd ramped up to over 6000 in both May and June. Plus in June they also sold ~5000 Model S & Xs. In June Volt and Bolt sales combined were under 2500.
https://insideevs.com/june-201... [insideevs.com]
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It's outselling Tesla? By what metric? Source?
$1.1 billion wasted (Score:1)
Does this mean they will not be buying self driving AI from Google? Which Google spent $1.1 billion on? No worries, I'm sure another car maker will use Google tech, just like Google is using search algorithms developed by Pep Boys.
Re: $1.1 billion wasted (Score:2)
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Level 2 is lane assist, cruise control and possible automatic braking. (Autonomous car classification [wikipedia.org])
I am pretty sure Ford already have cars with those.
Automatic braking and a navigator might take it into level 3, the definition isn't that clear.
The navigator you will give you the "request to intervene" when you need to do something beyond following a lane.
I'm pretty sure that Ford is aiming at at level 4.
$4 billion seems a bit too much for technology they already have.
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If Google gets self-deceiving tech first (level 1 or level 2) then Ford will license it. Otherwise, if Ford gets there first, they will have a huge competitive advantage over other automakers.
Uber already has self-deceiving tech, methinks.
Which Ford vehicles exactly? (Score:3)
They just announced the only thing they're sticking with is the Mustang, the F-150s and bunch of SUVs.
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And also another small car, a tall focus or fiesta or something. But it's expensive vehicles that will be autonomous first, because autonomy is expensive. The other kind of vehicle that they will still produce here that you forgot is the Transit, which is the vehicle you can expect to see automated first, for transit fleets.
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Won't matter (Score:2)
Even if they released the tech tomorrow, it will be a decade before it's affordable enough for normal folks to even consider it. It's also a very disruptive
tech for established business models, so expect it to be hampered every step of the way by folks who have lots of money and influence.
Companies like to make ludicrous claims such as these all the time. Hell, my own company made claims of how amazing we are going to be by 2020
until ( as we are only 1.5 years out ) they have started to realize that rea
6,000 engineers for 5 years, 300 of those great (Score:5, Interesting)
A billion per year will get them about 6,000 engineers and coders in the area.
Let's assume they aren't great at hiring, so 20% of the engineers don't do anything more useful than filling out change forms and other paperwork for the decent engineers.
Assume 30% of them can do fairly simple tasks competently, such as writing a module according the requirements written by a more experienced person. That's 2,000 engineers doing the grunt work, basically competent coders, but don't deserve the "engineer" title.
35% know how to write requirements for a user story and can code it up.
10% come up with good approaches to interesting, but not terribly difficult, problems.
5%, or 300 of them, are very good. These are the people who come up with really good ideas that significantly improve the project.
Give me that team for five years and we'll come up with something pretty darn cool.
Looking at it another way, given 100 years to work on it, I could do it. 100 years is a long time. A hundred years of my time would cost them $15 million. They're spending $4 billion. They need to achieve 0.3% efficiency to pull it off.
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If they spent all the budget on headcount, they'd have a bunch of employees sitting around finger-twiddling because they wouldn't have anything to work on, or with. Four billion isn't what it used to be. It costs a billion plus just to design a new auto... With EXISTING personnel.
Twice as many if they didn't have anything to work (Score:2)
My numbers figure for this kind of work, half the day expense is salaries.
My hobby is studying. No good at games, good at sw (Score:2)
Some people are good at physical sports, like football.
Some nerdy types spend their time getting really good at various table or computer games. Some people are really good artists.
I spend my time studying software engineering and law. I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't kick a ball, I CAN design a database.
PS - been studying for 30 years (Score:2)
Btw, I'm also old. I've been studying information systems for 30 years.
So, computer engineers are overpaid and bad? (Score:1)
From a societal perspective, I really question the value that you are assigning to th
Large companies are inefficient, but why make more (Score:2)
> you are implying that somehow each engineer deserves $166,000 a year salary for effectively doing very little.
That would neither be their salary, not did I say anything at all about deserving it. If someone costs the company $160K, their salary will be about $100K. Neither health insurance nor office space nor payroll taxes are free. Neither are the computers and other tools they use, nor the networks which connect them all, nor ...
> or provide a full scholarships for a solid engineering education a
Why a separate company (LLC)? (Score:2)
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That's an interesting question. My guess is salaries and management structure. Salaries at Ford are linked to your grade, and the brackets for each grade are fixed. So if you want to bring a rock star on board, you have to give them a high grade. Later on when they want to move around there will be no positions they have the training or experience for outside of their field.
Risk avoidance could be part of it. If there is a class action perhaps it would be FAV that gets hit with a penalty sufficient to dama