Ford Drops More Hints about Its All-New Driverless Vehicle—Here’s Where It Stands versus Competitors

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General Motors has made the Chevrolet Bolt EV the flagship of its future autonomous fleet. Uber has a high-profile partnership revolving around Volvo’s XC90 SUVs for its self-driving future. Waymo has made itself synonymous with Chrysler minivans. Ford, on the other hand, hasn’t revealed much to date about the vehicle it intends to use to usher in its self-driving business.

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That started changing this week, when Ford’s executive vice president of global products offered at least a peek at Ford’s approach to building an entirely new vehicle tailor-made for the autonomous age. In a blog post published on Medium, Jim Farley wrote that the company has been developing a hybrid vehicle that will be suited for commercial deployment in both ride-hailing and delivery fleets.

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These fully driverless vehicles will be manufactured at Ford’s Flat Rock Assembly Plant in southeastern Michigan. Multiple pilot projects involving both the technology and business models that underpin their use cases will begin sometime in 2018 in the as yet unspecified city where Ford intends to launch its commercial service. That large-scale launch, as previously announced, remains on track for 2021.

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“We’re spending an extensive amount of time conducting research into how people are using new services such as ride hailing today, and we’re looking at how they can evolve with the introduction of autonomous vehicles,” Farley wrote. “We feel this optimization across the vehicle, technology, and customer experience will differentiate our business as we begin to serve leading companies, such as Lyft, in the movement of people and goods.”

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Ford’s footsteps in this area are important because some consider the company’s autonomous developments as the industry’s front-runner, and further, Farley’s nod toward Lyft suggests the partnership the two companies formed in September is a central component of Ford’s plans for launching automated cars in commercial service in 2021.

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That’s roughly two years later than General Motors plans to launch autonomous service. GM executives said in a conference call with investors last week they intend to start service in 2019, and GM CEO Mary Barra has repeated in recent weeks that the company is “quarters, not years” away from launching autonomous Chevrolet Bolt EVs. At least in part, Farley’s blog post seems designed to counterbalance the news cycle between the long-time competitors—indeed, the two companies and their subsidiaries seem to be trading a series of Medium posts as proxies for the self-driving race itself.

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But over the long term, how these two companies get to the marketplace might be more interesting than when they get there.

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Not Following the All-Electric Crowd

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In that respect, Farley’s post is revealing, in that Ford intends to use a gasoline-electric powertrain in its autonomous vehicles, a different approach than General Motors, which pinned its autonomous aspirations squarely on the all-electric Bolt EV, and other companies with driverless plans that also revolve around fully electric vehicles.

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With a lone fully electric car, the Focus Electric, in Ford’s current lineup and a broader portfolio of hybrid vehicles, it makes some sense that Ford would stick with its current strength. But for autonomous applications, a company spokesperson said the decision to go with a hybrid is less about the company’s current product line and more about the general state of battery technology.

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“You want to be out on the road, and not sitting at a charger, and that’s where the hybrid fits our business model really well,” the spokesperson said. “You get great gas mileage, and you still have the ability to gas up and go. And it prevents having the miles driven back to a depot or charging station because those are non-revenue-generating miles.”

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While a human will still need to pump gas, and DC fast chargers might allay some time constraints, Ford is more concerned that frequent charging will degrade batteries. In a commercial scenario in which vehicles are charged multiple times per day, that leads to a shorter battery life cycle.

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Keep the Cars on the Road
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As much as possible, ongoing maintenance is frowned upon in the Ford model; Farley detailed in his Medium post that ramping up the workload of these vehicles is a linchpin of a successful business plan. Most personally owned vehicles sit idle more than 95 percent of the time, according to academic studies, but Ford wants to flip that utilization rate and keep vehicles in service upward of 20 hours per day. It’s a practice akin to airlines keeping planes in the air rather than parked at a gate. To accomplish that, automated vehicles deployed in city environments must handle more frequent and rigorous use.

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“What this means is that our self-driving vehicle will have upgraded components, such as brakes, wheels, and body structures that can withstand more extreme work cycles, and that it will undergo more rigid durability testing before it goes on the road,” Farley wrote.

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How these vehicles interact with customers, riders, and others along the road alike remains another focus. Farley describes a lighting system designed in conjunction with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute that could help autonomous vehicles signal to pedestrians, bicyclists, and other motorists how the vehicles intend to act, something other automakers like Nissan have also researched. In Ford’s version, a light bar at the top of the windshield would have three basic indications that showed the car was driving, whether it intended to yield, or if it will start moving from a stopped position. And, he wrote, Ford has learned from its ongoing partnership with Domino’s Pizza that customers appreciate the ability to talk with a vehicle.

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Picking the Right Urban Laboratory
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As for the city where Ford intends to launch its service, Farley and others aren’t saying. Ford has extensive technology development and testing operations in Pittsburgh and in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but for technical reasons, commercial deployment is far more likely in a warm-weather market where snow and rain don’t present hindrances for the sensors affixed on automated vehicles.

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In the not-too-distant past, Ford used London as a hub for testing ride-hailed shuttle buses along optimized routes, and the company opened a Smart Mobility Innovation office there in October. The office is slated to tackle “near-term development of smart mobility technologies,” which includes a pilot involving plug-in hybrid transit. Closer to home, in Austin, Texas, Ford has conducted pilots of fractional ownership models and, through its Chariot shuttle subsidiary, set up routes that blend public and private transportation. Ford isn’t offering any hints, but given its warm-weather climate and track record with the company, Austin would be a sensible and attractive candidate to host the next step.

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• Why Ford, Lincoln, and Lexus Testers Rule the Self-Driving Roost

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“Next year will be an important time for us, as we begin to test both our self-driving technology and business model in a variety of pilot programs in the first city in which we plan to operate an autonomous-vehicle business,” Farley wrote.

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Waymo has established its Early Rider program in Phoenix, while General Motors, via its Cruise Automation subsidiary, intends to deploy in San Francisco. Though vehicle and location remain big question marks for Ford, at the very least, the company’s strategy is starting to come into clearer focus.

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