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.
“Commercialization of L4 autonomy at scale will take considerably longer than we originally anticipated,” said Doug Field, Ford’s chief advanced product development and technology officer, during the call. “L2+ and L3 driver-assist technologies to offer a bigger targeted client base, allowing for faster scaling and profitability.”
Farley predicts that upgraded L2+ and L3 systems will be available in the following years, along with the company’s second EV cycle in 2023-2025. “Ford is entirely renewing its worldwide EV range, offering fully updatable electrical designs and in-house software development for vehicle management,” Farley said.
Fields emphasized the significance of retaining a large portion of the back-end operations of these emerging ADAS systems in-house. “We will have a core staff capable of integrating a system and understanding its performance at the system level,” he stated. “We will also own the software. It is critical that we also control the connectivity to these cars. Because L3 is a linked technology, we must possess the ability to create a pipeline that gathers data and improves the system over time.”
“That’s an issue that doesn’t exist in L4 and represents a great potential for us to build a really distinct Ford experience.” Fields said.
