Ford Forges On With 2021 Fully Autonomous Goal Despite Regulatory Obstacles

The road to a fully autonomous future is going to be a hard one, at least, if government agencies and their respective personnel don’t get with the program. Despite the obstacles, however, Ford is determined to have a fleet of fully autonomous vehicles by 2021, which they can then provide to cab hailing services.

Ford CEO Mark Fields spoke at the company’s Silicon Valley campus, located in Palo Alto, California on Tuesday to talk about Ford’s goals and views when it comes to fully autonomous driving, Business Insider reports. That is to say, a vehicle that doesn’t have a steering wheel or gas pedals driving itself without driver intervention.

 "This is a transformational moment in our industry and it is a transformational moment for our company," he said.

It would seem that Ford is not willing to gradually introduce the technology into their vehicles, as companies like BMW and Tesla are doing at the moment. Instead, the car maker wants to jump right in once the technology itself has been perfected to the point that it can safely be placed on the roads. A concept that Raj Nair, chief technical officer at Ford iterated.

According to Nair, Ford will still be creating driver-assist technology such as “automatic emergency braking” and “lane departure warning,” but dithering between a driver-controlled car and a machine-controlled one can be risky in the eyes of the car maker. As the recent case with Tesla drivers crashing when the auto-pilot features are activated have shown, it is very difficult to make sure that the drivers won’t disengage as soon as the car takes over.

So instead of putting time and effort into trying to blend the two elements together, Ford opted to just remove the driver from the equation altogether, and this could be the future of cab hailing services. As Gizmodo pointed out, passengers could be picked up by cars without steering wheels or gas pedals in the future when calling for a cab via Uber, Lyft or other such services.

Among the major obstacles standing in the way of Ford reaching this goal, however, are the Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Both government agencies currently have rules preventing many of the fully autonomous features of vehicles from taking place. With regards to steering wheels, for example, both agencies have rules that explicitly forbid their removal.