In the past, I have been down on Ford. No longer.

Doug Newcomb from Wired has a great post up today at Wired.com about Ford bringing driver assist technology mainstream:

The automaker has announced two new driver assistance technologies: Traffic Jam Assist and the addition of perpendicular parking to its Active Park Assist system. Ford says it’s developing Traffic Jam Assist for the “mid-term” and the perpendicular parking feature for the “near-term.”

Traffic Jam Assist is essentially a mash-up of active cruise control and lane-position technology, which Ford notes are already available on current Ford models such as the Focus, Escape and Fusion. Radar sensors and cameras on the car help it keep pace with other vehicles in traffic and stay in its lane. Ford says the feature could potentially improve the flow of traffic “where there are no pedestrians, cyclists or animals, and where lanes are clearly marked.”

Ford has some big ambitions for this technology:

The automaker also claims that in cases in which just 25 percent of vehicles are equipped with Traffic Jam Assist, commutes times on a stretch of road can be reduced by 37.5 percent and delays reduced by 20 percent, “saving millions of gallons of fuel each year.” And to make sure that the driver doesn’t rely on technology to keep the car on track and spend timing texting instead, Ford says Traffic Jam Assist will include features to guarantee the driver stays engaged.

 

And I just LOVE this quote from Doug:

Get used to it: The car is taking control. Resistance is futile. And for those who know how to drive, you can always choose to turn it off.

This one literally JUST came through via email so apologies for the late notice.

On Thursday, May 24, 2012 Time: 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM EDT; the GTMA (Geospatial-Transportation Mapping Association) is running a webinar on driverless car technology.

I’ll let them explain it:

 In 2012, Utah DOT awarded a contract to Mandli Communications to digitally collect roadway assets using the latest in mobile network technologies. The data captured under the Utah project is not only valuable in improving asset management and roadway safety; it may also help unlock the door to the autonomous vehicles of tomorrow. This GTMA sponsored webinar features Mandli President, Ray Mandli, providing an overview of the project. How will the data be collected? What technologies are involved and what quality control measures are in place to ensure accuracy? Mr. Mandli will endeavor to answer these questions. Professor John Leonard (MIT), co-director of the Ford-MIT Alliance, and James McBride, Ph.D., Technical Expert in Ford Motor Company’s Research and Advanced Engineering Department, will then discuss how the data collected under the Utah project could be enhanced to increase its value for researchers developing the first generation of autonomous vehicles. The state of Utah is a great location for collecting data for autonomous vehicle researchers. It has mountains and desert, straight and curved roads, city and urban topographies. Digital asset collection technologies have tremendous potential in improving the way states manage assets today. This webinar is designed to enhance its ability to bring us a new generation of safer and more efficient vehicles tomorrow.

Register here to be a part.

The presence of John Leonard and Jim McBride promises to be a real treat.

Ford, via Wired.com

My opinions on Ford are well known but you have to give them credit – in terms of actually putting rubber on the road they are definitely the industry leaders in bringing Driver Assist to the humble masses.

Wired has a recent article going into detail on the features of the new Ford Fusion 2013.

Among the technologies on board: Driver Alert, which uses a camera pointed at the road to detect patterns of motion that are consistent with drowsy driving. If it senses that you’re falling asleep, it’ll trigger a “series of alerts” including a coffee cup icon on the dash, all intended to get you to pull over and take a break. Unfortunately, no actual coffee is dispensed, and it also won’t let your boss know you’re going to be late for work because you stopped for a nap.

Amazing, awesome, interesting, fantastic.

Those are all words to describe this interview published yesterday on Just-Auto.com with Dr Nady Boules, director of GM’s Electrical and Control Integration Research Lab.

It’s amazing to see the huge difference between GM and Ford on this. GM seems excited to play a lead role while Ford wants to wait (read my infamous 2am rant on this for more).

GM just gets it. They see the disruptive nature of the technology and want to take the lead. God BLESS you, GM! First the Volt, now this, and they are also cranking through enormous profits to boot. I love it, I love it. Enough rambling – here’s some key quotes:

V2V – why it is necessary:

“When vehicle to vehicle [V2V] communication is universal, autonomous driving becomes more affordable because you need fewer sensors.” V2V allows vehicles to inform each other of their position and trajectory, so it would not need to be sensed.

V2V via DSRC at 5.9GHz is now standardized and a number of automotive OEMs have proved inter-operability, to the extent that Boules claims there is no issue with its adoption as a global standard.

Privacy:

Despite cars broadcasting their positions and speeds, privacy issues don’t bother Boules. He points out that the DSRC data is anonymised. Besides. “We consider privacy as one of the most import areas we have to protect. People trust GM with their data. We have has OnStar since 1996 and we have kept the data safe.” He says no speeding ticket has ever used OnStar data.

Some manufacturers have expressed reservations about autonomous driving because it would take away their marketing advantage of producers of cars drivers actually want to drive. Says Boules, “We recognise some drivers say ‘You’ll take away the steering wheel over my dead body.’ I personally believe there will be a time when people will feel insecure actually driving on the road and will go to special ‘driving ranges’ to practice driving themselves for fun. But if you have your family with you, you’ll say ‘I’ll let the car take care of this.’”

The New Super Cruise Technology:

Despite the fact that many of these individual elements are on the market now, the effect of combining them is striking, Boules says, “It’s a very discernible step-change when you go semi-autonomous, hands-free and foot-free at the same time. The management, when they try it, always come away wowed. Letting go of the steering wheel really is a big deal.

I just came across a short article by Michael Wayland mlive.com that summarises the efforts of Google, Continental, Ford and GM in the field of producing a driverless car.

In short the article doesn’t offer much new, mostly each company emphasising the need for more testing of the technology. Ford do seem to be indicating they are aiming for 2017 for some degree of “autopilot” technology in their vehicles. Continental on the other hand seem to be hinting at a 2020 goal for having their sensor technology available.

On one hand I’m a little sceptical of dates and deadlines, on the other with so many competitors trying to commercialise driverless car technology the pressure really is on to be the first on the market.

GigaOm is running an in-depth article today looking at the development of the Ford driverless car program.

It’s a fascinating 5 minutes of reading which features quotes from some of the heavies of Ford and is in many ways depressing as these people are at the steering wheel of autonomous car development.

According to Jim McBride of Ford Research and Innovation, “the big barrier to overcome is customer acceptance.” And then we find this quote later on in the article, about their polling and focus groups – ” people are still uncomfortable with the idea of ceding the driver’s seat to a computer….”

NO. SHIT.

Of course people will hesitate before using a product that they have never seen in operation!! Imagine doing focus groups on airplanes before they were invented!! If you can’t market a driverless car to get over the (few) concerns had by potential consumers then you really should get as far away from marketing as possible. Don’t forget that you don’t need to convince every single person to buy your product in order to make money.

Driverless Cars are close to the holy grail of product marketing:

They will be:

1. More convenient.

2. Cheaper*.

3. More comfortable.

4. Safer.

6. Exciting new technology.

7. More environmentally friendly.+

The drawbacks are they could reduce some driving pleasure and won’t be as sexy.

*We predict that driverless cars will be cheaper because they will largely function as very cheap taxis. Given that the ownership of the car will be split between you and all the other users on the network, the costs of car usage will drop by 50-80% per person.

+ Driverless cars are likely to be electric or hybrids as they will be able to move to recharging locations after dropping passengers off.

Yes they are, no they’re not, yes they are…

Jim Buczkowski from Ford Research and Innovation (and recently featured on this blog) has had a long chat with Mark Hachman of PC Mag.

Based on Buczkowski’s comments in this article, it appears that Ford is actively working on the technology but has not taken the step of trying to create an actual vehicle.

We definitely are looking at the impact that autonomous vehicles will have in the future,” Buczkowski said in a recent interview with PCMag. “It’s going to come in stages, and it’s very logical to see how conditions like freeway driving will be the first place to see that kind of stuff. So the interesting thing about the effort toward autonomous driving is the knowledge that we’re building and creating the processing of information, the fusing of sensor information and so on.”

But perhaps more interesting:

The problem, Buczkowski added, is that a car that reacts to an emergency might be occasionally, well, wrong. “The problem with a false alert is that it really hurts confidence in the autonomous system. If I slam on the brakes once every hundred thousand miles you drive – just that once and you will lose total confidence in the system, even though statistically you can say that it’s not going to happen very often. But boom, it shakes your confidence.”

Ford is doing a “lot of work and testing to establish that confidence,” Buczkowski said. (emphasis ours)

Very interesting indeed…

Bill Ford’s presence at the 2012 World Mobile Congress in Barcelona has been making headlines for the past few days now.

He sees an exciting future for electric cars: