How technology is changing Ford, in the words of its CTO

Technologies like self-driving vehicles and electric powertrains are opening new doors.

Jonathan M. Gitlin (US) - 16/1/2017, 10:52

DETROIT—One of the home team, Ford had a few things to announce at this year's North American International Auto Show. Its best-seller, the F-150 truck, got a mid-life refresh, and the company announced that it's finally reintroducing the smaller Ranger truck to the US in a couple of years. The Bronco
SUV will be reborn, too, a year after that.
But some of the more interesting developments at the Blue Oval have been underway for a while now, as the company grows beyond car making into that ever-present buzzword, "mobility." Ford is working on self-driving technology, a range of plug-in hybrid and battery electric vehicles, and ride-hailing services. It's even found time to make a Le Mans-winning supercar. We sat down with Raj Nair, Ford's Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President, Product Development, to find out a bit more about those different programs and how Ford's business is changing:

We sit down with Ford's Raj Nair at NAIAS.

Jennifer Hahn

Interest in automobiles—particularly among that crucial demographic, the young—just isn't what it used to be. More of us are living in denser urban cores, which are better suited to modes of transportation other than the personal vehicle. Traffic keeps growing, prompting Bill Ford make it the subject of his TED talk. Climate change isn't going away. "The time is right for new solutions," Nair told us.
Ford plans to bring an autonomous vehicle to mass production by 2021. But it won't be for sale in showrooms; instead, it will be a fleet operated by Ford, ferrying paying customers (and probably cargo) around well-defined geofenced areas.
The company has also said it's not going to pursue the intermediate level 3 stage of self-driving cars, in which the human might be in control during some parts of a journey while control is handed back and forth. Instead, Ford wants to skip straight to autonomous pods that don't have a steering wheel or pedals at all. Nair explained the decision came down to the problem of situational awareness.
Imagine the following scenario: your autonomous car is about to reach a geofenced border, beyond which it doesn't have a good enough map to continue driving itself. It needs you, the driver, to take the wheel. But how does it know whether or not you're paying sufficient attention to take over? "You could add technologies to make sure [drivers] were aware," Nair explained, but adding costly driver monitoring systems on top of costly autonomous driving systems doesn't make business sense.
This post originated on Ars Technica
Listing image by Ford