Ford CEO Jim Farley joined the company’s Q3 earnings conference just after word surfaced that its self-driving subsidiary Argo AI will be shut down, and talked at length about how senior management got to that decision. “It is estimated that over a hundred billion dollars have been spent in the promise of level four autonomy,” he stated on the call, “and yet no one has established a sustainable business model at scale.”
In brief, Ford is shifting its investments away from the longer-term aim of Level 4 autonomy (a vehicle capable of navigating without human involvement, albeit manual control is still available) and toward the more immediate short-term advantages of speedier L2+ and L3 autonomy. L2+ is today’s cutting-edge technology, similar to Ford’s BlueCruise or GM’s SuperCruise technologies, with hands-free driving along pre-mapped highway routes; L3 is where the vehicle handles all safety-critical duties along certain routes, not only steering and lane-keeping.
