7 ms·

Ford tops the list of automated driving leaders in new study

58 points by Fricken 10y ago

x_foo_x 10y ago
Then I guess Telsa marketing dept > Ford marketing dept.
EStudley 10y ago
"The annual survey looked at 18 different companies, smeared across 10 different criteria, ranging from strategy, to core tech development, to manufacturing capability and staying power, and a company that’s over 100 years old ended up leading the list." Why does 'manufacturing capability and staying power' correlate to 'potential in the world of autonomous driving'? It doesn't matter if you can pump out a thousand cars an hour if they crash a mile down the road. This should be based on core tech development only..
- whalesalad 10y ago
  The inverse is also important. If you "invent" the best tech possible but have no way to get it onto the road -- is it the best?
  - EStudley 10y ago
    I get that. It just seems like that specific metric could have been over-weighted seeing as how Ford and GM were at the top of the list..
    - Fricken 10y ago
      I think GM deserves to be at the top of the list. Cruise is very quickly closing the gap between themselves and Waymo, and they have a comitted car company to back them up. The jury is still out as to whether Ford can make good headway on their 'secret sauce', which is now in the hands of Argo.ai.
      - Judgmentality 10y ago
        Yeah, Cruise seems to be doing a great job. Argo has a great founding team, but there are still a lot of things that can go wrong. While I'd give Argo the edge in technical competence (I realize that's not a very meaningful statement considering the age of the company), what really matters is building the right product at the right time. You can have a ton of great engineers and still not accomplish much in the market - just look at Waymo and Uber. The way I see it, at least in the US, it's really GM vs Ford (which is Cruise vs Argo). Waymo has a management crisis and lost most of their top talent, and Uber is hemorrhaging talent (and money). Apart from that there are various startups but I don't believe they'll ever get the money necessary to compete with the big players - even Google gave up on that front. Outside the US I'm excited to see what happens with Volvo, which says they'll have 100 stage 4 vehicles delivered to customers by the end of the year.
  - briandear 10y ago
    Everyone reading this should watch the film Tucker: A Man and his Dream. Sort of a 1950s Elon Musk.
- matthewmacleod 10y ago
  That's silly - what's the point in excellent core technology if you are unable to manufacture enough vehicles or bring them to market?
- kbenson 10y ago
  > This should be based on core tech development only.. What good is the tech if you can't put it into production? There are real design and manufacturing issues to deal with, and a company that doesn't take that into consideration and give it the attention it deserves likely won't do well in the long run.
Isamu 10y ago
> During the past year, Ford has invested in Civil Maps, Velodyne, and autonomous AI startup Argo – plus it acquired Chariot, and algorithmic platform startup SAIPS. Plus they actually make cars, that's apparently why they are highly ranked. But their investments have yet to bear fruit, we will have to wait and see.
dayaz36 10y ago
I'm hoping people here are smart enough not to actually believe this nonsense. Tesla is BY FAR the leader in autonomous driving
- plandis 10y ago
  I'm not saying you're wrong but do you have anything other than anecdotal data?
  - dayaz36 10y ago
    Data is king when it comes to autonomous driving tech. Last time I checked Tesla had over a billion miles driven (may have passed 2 billion by now) in real world environment. Google has the second most data collected with 2-3 million miles driven which is orders of magnitude lower than Tesla. Not even gonna mention Ford. Also Tesla is the only company that has the hardware setup for full autonomy to achieve level 5 on a production car. They are just working on software. Any other company couldn't even theoretically have level 5 autonomy even if they had the software ready to go
    - FireBeyond 10y ago
      > Also Tesla is the only company that has the hardware setup for full autonomy to achieve level 5 on a production car. They are just working on software. Any other company couldn't even theoretically have level 5 autonomy even if they had the software ready to go And yet, aren't they -removing- hardware? And as a result, a whole new slew of their autopilot getting _worse_ is hitting the Internet. And some of those are really embarrassing - sunny day but not blinding brightness, clear line markings and the car will just veer into the oncoming lane, or entirely off road with little to no warning.
    - bladers 10y ago
      Tesla doesn't have billions of miles of data. You have been lied to and you bought it Hook line and sinker. The data Tesla collect are high precision map based on Gps logging and radar blacklist for false positives. All that data is useless for anything other than level 2. You're a portrait of the Tesla hype. But I don't blame you
apsec112 10y ago
Reports like this are meaningless, because they make up arbitrary categories, and then assign them arbitrary weights. This one is especially bad because it has categories that are almost impossible to judge objectively, like "Strategy". Reminds me of San Francisco's report on the Central Subway. They created eight categories, equally weighted, of which one was "cost". Of course, everything in construction trades off against cost. So the most expensive option always came out ahead, because it "gained" in seven categories but "lost" in one.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
revelation 10y ago
The only relevant data you could possibly look at is the disengagement reports they are legally required to provide. And looking at those, it's Google... and then nobody else for a long, long, long time.
michaelbuckbee 10y ago
This was a couple years ago (and I apologize for not being able to find a source), but I heard an interview with a Ford exec about the limits of adaptive cruise control and collision avoidance and he basically said: "Our drivers don't want that. They want the control of their own vehicle." And not that it's set in stone, and not that organizations can't change, but in general it sure seems like Ford and the other big automakers don't want self driving cars. Partially, it's a concern that they'll see their existing model torn to shreds if self driving cars become the basis for much more efficient on demand or fractional ownership car usage. And I think partially it's that the designers, engineers, exec's at Ford are "car people". They love driving cars, they see a romance to them ("the open road"), they have "daily drivers" and "my pride and joy" type of relationships with their cars. If nothing else, it's abundantly clear that Tesla is coming at this from a whole different direction.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Here's the CEO of Ford a few weeks ago talking about launching a car with Level 4 autonomy, with a goal of doing it by 2021: http://www.businessinsider.com/ford-ceo-driverless-car-fear-2017-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/ford-ceo-driverless-car-fear-... So not really resisting the whole thing, just no belief that hand offs can work safely.
  - Fricken 10y ago
    The auto industry has done an about face over the past couple years, switching from a belief in an incremental approach to going straight for level 4 robotaxis, as Waymo has been doing from the start. Tesla is the notable exception.
  - f4rker 10y ago
    Ford has that whole "roll over problem" back in the day. I'm sure they are not dying to rush to AI driving and be in the press again...
- cujo 10y ago
  Are you sure? From where I sit, it looks like Tesla is just offering a traditional car with a different set of organs. They don't seem to show any signs of doing anything different than ford on the sales/direction angle.
dsfyu404ed 10y ago
Like I said before, you can't turn an aircraft carrier on a dime but when it finally comes around you've got a fking aircraft carrier. The established players in the auto industry noticed Tesla a few years back, began writing checks and now the ship has come around and they're closing the gap.
- Spare_account 10y ago
  I don't have any sources to back this up but I don't think that worries Musk. I don't think he's actually overly concerned about Tesla succeeding at self driving cars, or electric cars. Musk wants the self driving car industry to be better. He needs those technologies to be significantly better for his interplanetary ambitions to be realised. The solar roof, the power bank, all of the other endeavours he is engaged in are all intended to catalyse the industries that he's rattling the cage of. He'll need them on Mars and they're not good enough at the moment. Ford winning at self driving cars is a good result for Musk.
  - jstandard 10y ago
    I think GP was talking about winning autonomous cars. While it might be the case Musk isn't concerned, that's a bad result for 30,000 other employees who are more invested than Musk in the success of their company.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
onmobiletemp 10y ago
I dont have deep knowledge of this but wow, what a laugh this is. Tesla has a huge fleet of vehicles that its training with. Ford bought some lidar stuff. Yeah, once you have an aircraft carrier on your tail its big trouble but ford has directed their aircraft carrier in the completely wrong direction. An aircraft carrier is useless without a captain.
skdotdan 10y ago
Time to long Ford.
twobuy 10y ago
I know this isn't normally the forum for these sort of comments, but is anyone else put-off by how this story occurred the same day as the 'Tesla overtakes Ford' story?

58 points by Fricken 10y ago

Then I guess Telsa marketing dept > Ford marketing dept.

"The annual survey looked at 18 different companies, smeared across 10 different criteria, ranging from strategy, to core tech development, to manufacturing capability and staying power, and a company that’s over 100 years old ended up leading the list." Why does 'manufacturing capability and staying power' correlate to 'potential in the world of autonomous driving'? It doesn't matter if you can pump out a thousand cars an hour if they crash a mile down the road. This should be based on core tech development only..

whalesalad 10y ago
The inverse is also important. If you "invent" the best tech possible but have no way to get it onto the road -- is it the best?
- EStudley 10y ago
  I get that. It just seems like that specific metric could have been over-weighted seeing as how Ford and GM were at the top of the list..
  - Fricken 10y ago
    I think GM deserves to be at the top of the list. Cruise is very quickly closing the gap between themselves and Waymo, and they have a comitted car company to back them up. The jury is still out as to whether Ford can make good headway on their 'secret sauce', which is now in the hands of Argo.ai.
    - Judgmentality 10y ago
      Yeah, Cruise seems to be doing a great job. Argo has a great founding team, but there are still a lot of things that can go wrong. While I'd give Argo the edge in technical competence (I realize that's not a very meaningful statement considering the age of the company), what really matters is building the right product at the right time. You can have a ton of great engineers and still not accomplish much in the market - just look at Waymo and Uber. The way I see it, at least in the US, it's really GM vs Ford (which is Cruise vs Argo). Waymo has a management crisis and lost most of their top talent, and Uber is hemorrhaging talent (and money). Apart from that there are various startups but I don't believe they'll ever get the money necessary to compete with the big players - even Google gave up on that front. Outside the US I'm excited to see what happens with Volvo, which says they'll have 100 stage 4 vehicles delivered to customers by the end of the year.
- briandear 10y ago
  Everyone reading this should watch the film Tucker: A Man and his Dream. Sort of a 1950s Elon Musk.
matthewmacleod 10y ago
That's silly - what's the point in excellent core technology if you are unable to manufacture enough vehicles or bring them to market?
kbenson 10y ago
> This should be based on core tech development only.. What good is the tech if you can't put it into production? There are real design and manufacturing issues to deal with, and a company that doesn't take that into consideration and give it the attention it deserves likely won't do well in the long run.

Isamu 10y ago

> During the past year, Ford has invested in Civil Maps, Velodyne, and autonomous AI startup Argo – plus it acquired Chariot, and algorithmic platform startup SAIPS. Plus they actually make cars, that's apparently why they are highly ranked. But their investments have yet to bear fruit, we will have to wait and see.

dayaz36 10y ago

I'm hoping people here are smart enough not to actually believe this nonsense. Tesla is BY FAR the leader in autonomous driving

plandis 10y ago
I'm not saying you're wrong but do you have anything other than anecdotal data?
- dayaz36 10y ago
  Data is king when it comes to autonomous driving tech. Last time I checked Tesla had over a billion miles driven (may have passed 2 billion by now) in real world environment. Google has the second most data collected with 2-3 million miles driven which is orders of magnitude lower than Tesla. Not even gonna mention Ford. Also Tesla is the only company that has the hardware setup for full autonomy to achieve level 5 on a production car. They are just working on software. Any other company couldn't even theoretically have level 5 autonomy even if they had the software ready to go
  - FireBeyond 10y ago
    > Also Tesla is the only company that has the hardware setup for full autonomy to achieve level 5 on a production car. They are just working on software. Any other company couldn't even theoretically have level 5 autonomy even if they had the software ready to go And yet, aren't they -removing- hardware? And as a result, a whole new slew of their autopilot getting _worse_ is hitting the Internet. And some of those are really embarrassing - sunny day but not blinding brightness, clear line markings and the car will just veer into the oncoming lane, or entirely off road with little to no warning.
  - bladers 10y ago
    Tesla doesn't have billions of miles of data. You have been lied to and you bought it Hook line and sinker. The data Tesla collect are high precision map based on Gps logging and radar blacklist for false positives. All that data is useless for anything other than level 2. You're a portrait of the Tesla hype. But I don't blame you

apsec112 10y ago

Reports like this are meaningless, because they make up arbitrary categories, and then assign them arbitrary weights. This one is especially bad because it has categories that are almost impossible to judge objectively, like "Strategy". Reminds me of San Francisco's report on the Central Subway. They created eight categories, equally weighted, of which one was "cost". Of course, everything in construction trades off against cost. So the most expensive option always came out ahead, because it "gained" in seven categories but "lost" in one.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

revelation 10y ago

The only relevant data you could possibly look at is the disengagement reports they are legally required to provide. And looking at those, it's Google... and then nobody else for a long, long, long time.

michaelbuckbee 10y ago

This was a couple years ago (and I apologize for not being able to find a source), but I heard an interview with a Ford exec about the limits of adaptive cruise control and collision avoidance and he basically said: "Our drivers don't want that. They want the control of their own vehicle." And not that it's set in stone, and not that organizations can't change, but in general it sure seems like Ford and the other big automakers don't want self driving cars. Partially, it's a concern that they'll see their existing model torn to shreds if self driving cars become the basis for much more efficient on demand or fractional ownership car usage. And I think partially it's that the designers, engineers, exec's at Ford are "car people". They love driving cars, they see a romance to them ("the open road"), they have "daily drivers" and "my pride and joy" type of relationships with their cars. If nothing else, it's abundantly clear that Tesla is coming at this from a whole different direction.

maxerickson 10y ago
Here's the CEO of Ford a few weeks ago talking about launching a car with Level 4 autonomy, with a goal of doing it by 2021: http://www.businessinsider.com/ford-ceo-driverless-car-fear-2017-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/ford-ceo-driverless-car-fear-... So not really resisting the whole thing, just no belief that hand offs can work safely.
- Fricken 10y ago
  The auto industry has done an about face over the past couple years, switching from a belief in an incremental approach to going straight for level 4 robotaxis, as Waymo has been doing from the start. Tesla is the notable exception.
- f4rker 10y ago
  Ford has that whole "roll over problem" back in the day. I'm sure they are not dying to rush to AI driving and be in the press again...
cujo 10y ago
Are you sure? From where I sit, it looks like Tesla is just offering a traditional car with a different set of organs. They don't seem to show any signs of doing anything different than ford on the sales/direction angle.

dsfyu404ed 10y ago

Like I said before, you can't turn an aircraft carrier on a dime but when it finally comes around you've got a fking aircraft carrier. The established players in the auto industry noticed Tesla a few years back, began writing checks and now the ship has come around and they're closing the gap.

Spare_account 10y ago
I don't have any sources to back this up but I don't think that worries Musk. I don't think he's actually overly concerned about Tesla succeeding at self driving cars, or electric cars. Musk wants the self driving car industry to be better. He needs those technologies to be significantly better for his interplanetary ambitions to be realised. The solar roof, the power bank, all of the other endeavours he is engaged in are all intended to catalyse the industries that he's rattling the cage of. He'll need them on Mars and they're not good enough at the moment. Ford winning at self driving cars is a good result for Musk.
- jstandard 10y ago
  I think GP was talking about winning autonomous cars. While it might be the case Musk isn't concerned, that's a bad result for 30,000 other employees who are more invested than Musk in the success of their company.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

onmobiletemp 10y ago

I dont have deep knowledge of this but wow, what a laugh this is. Tesla has a huge fleet of vehicles that its training with. Ford bought some lidar stuff. Yeah, once you have an aircraft carrier on your tail its big trouble but ford has directed their aircraft carrier in the completely wrong direction. An aircraft carrier is useless without a captain.

skdotdan 10y ago

Time to long Ford.

twobuy 10y ago

I know this isn't normally the forum for these sort of comments, but is anyone else put-off by how this story occurred the same day as the 'Tesla overtakes Ford' story?