During the annual Further with Ford Summit in Palo Alto, California, the American automotive company is expecting fully autonomous vehicles to run in public roads in the next 5 years.
That’s right — it’s possible to buy and own a self-driving Ford car by 2020.
There are 3 modes for autonomy — Assistive, Remote and Fully Automated. Assistive mode is already in the market and being used by Ford vehicles in the form of collision detection, cruise control and obstacle avoidance.
Remote and fully automated mode are currently under research and development and we’ve seen some demo from Ford showing remote-parking cars.
Ford has identified several key factors for autonomous technology — sensors, high-powered processing, algorithms, 3D mapping, 4G connectivity and vehicle integration.
Aside from that, there are also several other external factors to take into account. One of them is how the vehicles will interact with pedestrian and how to identify pedestrian motive.
Check out the video demo of Remote Parking below:
It’s a pretty interesting discussion and exciting to know we’ll be seeing autonomous vehicles in some qualified streets in the next 5 years.
Oh, please. Ever since Mercedes-Benz paraded the first driverless cars way back in 97 hanggang ngayon wala pa ring resulta. Even Google stopped making noise about it. Just announce it when it’s finally working, okay?