Imagine you’re driving home from work and you get super hungry. You pick up some chicken nuggets and try to drive while eating them, but one lurches from your hand.
Today, it wouldn’t be safe to take your eyes off the road – or your hands off the wheel – to save it from the between-seat abyss. In around two years, Ford Motor Co. hopes to give motorists that option.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg TV’s David Westin, Ford CEO Jim Farley said the company is “getting really close” to its goal of offering SAE Level 3 autonomy by 2026. That would make it the first mass market car brand to offer the technology, according to Bloomberg.
SAE International, a professional standards organization, developed the Levels of Automatic guidance. Levels 0 to 3 cover automation that requires a driver but includes driver support features. At Level 3, the automated features take over and do not require driver surveillance. Unlike levels 4 and 5, Level 3 requires driver action and surveillance at times.
“Level 3 autonomy will allow you to go hands and eyes off the road on the highway in a couple years so then your car becomes like an office,” Farley said. “You could do a conference call and all sorts of stuff.”
Last September, Mercedes-Benz announced it would launch a production ready version of its Drive Pilot program with a limited fleet of Level 3 vehicles. However, Bloomberg noted the Mercedes-Benz feature only operates at speeds below 40 miles per hour on pre-approved freeways. Farley said Ford’s system is expected to operate at speeds of up to 80 miles per hour on the highway, but only under clear skies.
Farley said Ford’s test Level 3 program works “pretty regularly with a prototype, but doing it in a cost-effective way is just the progress we’re going to need to make.”
Ford has been working on offering autonomous services since at least 2016. It already operates a system called BlueCruise that offers hands-free highway driving.
“BlueCruise has been so much more popular than we expected, which is hands free,” Farley said. “It’s kind of the step before you get to eyes off.”
Earlier this year, the National Transportation Safety Board revealed that a driver operating a Ford in BlueCruise mode collided with a Honda on a Texas Interstate. The driver of the Honda was fatally injured.
Bloomberg reported that BlueCruise “is currently under investigation by U.S. safety regulators after being involved in fatal crashes,” and “Tesla Inc. and others are also being probed by federal authorities for crashes involving their semi-autonomous systems.”
“Is this always going to be a trust but verify model?” asked Dr. Sanjay Gupta the chief medical correspondent for CNN, on the Drive podcast. Gupta mentioned all the inputs that go into making the smallest decisions – such as whether to veer slightly to avoid something.
About a year ago, Ford announced the launch of Latitude AI, “a wholly owned subsidiary focused on developing a hands-free, eyes-off-the-road automated driving system for millions of vehicles,” and, per Bloomberg, it shut down its autonomous affiliate, Argo AI, “because it said achieving full self-driving was too far off.”
According to Bloomberg, Farley has hopes that autonomous features will serve as high-margin software services that smooth “out the boom-and-bust cycles in the car business.”
The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration said that “one day, automated driving systems, which some refer to as automated vehicles, may be able to handle the whole task of driving when we don’t want to or can’t do it ourselves.”
Still, Gupta brought up another factor in the autonomous driving game during his talk with Farley – the fact that Americans do like driving, even younger ones. He used his three teenage daughters are an example.
“My girls and all their friends want to drive,” he said.