Ford Forms Alliances With Uber, Lyft, Volvo And Google For Autonomous Cars

The tech and autonomous giants unite for a common agenda to promote autonomous cars.

Ford Motor Company has joined forces with Volvo, Lyft, Uber and Google so that they can come up with a coalition for the advocacy of self-driven cars. The group is adamant to get the autonomous cars in the industry at the earliest. These companies are demanding the help of federal action to make this dream a reality. As per a report by Reuters, the group desires to work with the regulatory bodies and lawmakers so that they can acknowledge the masses and generate awareness regarding the safety prospects and benefits of such vehicles.

Lyft and Volvo cars are also part and parcel of the “Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets”. The spokesperson and counsel for this project is Mr. David Strickland who has served at the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Mr. Strickland published a statement that laid emphasis on the need for distinct, clear and unified federal standards.

The NHTSA is providing information on various self-driven cars. Thus, they are likely to have a majority stake in the way these cars surface in the future. Autonomous cars are a big area of concern for both, the renowned automotive giants and tech companies since they are not only collaborating but also competing with one another to come up with self-driven cars. 

The NHTSA has plans to go to the Stanford University and conduct a public forum. This will help them in drawing comments for automotive and tech firms so that the guidelines can be chalked out for self-driven cars.

In a recent statement by Fords Motors, it has been confirmed that the coalition will ensure that a complete autonomous car surfaces at the earliest. According to a statement by Uber, the traffic accidents contribute to around 1.3 million deaths per annum. It is also believed that the self-driven cars can minimize the congestion and save innocent lives.

It is interesting to note that a great chunk of the statements are directly associated to the death caused by human errors. However, the failed to raise awareness on the issues that are aroused because of self-driven cars, this includes the mass cut off in jobs when such cars surface. For Uber, this will be a major change since it will not need human’s drivers to function but it can simply replace them with autonomous cars. to make this a reality, the company will have to make various hefty investments but they will then be able to overcome the controversies associated with human drivers.

Thus it is quite easy to gauge how the roll out of self-driven cars will benefit these companies. NHTSA has plans to surface the guidelines in July which will help set standard for policymakers, states and companies when it comes to autonomous cars. The NHTSA has highlighted that the artificial intelligence based system in the car can be coined as the driver.

Google Might Just Make Autonomous Cars A Reality

The company is striving hard to overcome all obstacle in terms of autonomous cars.

Back in February, Alphabet Inc.’s autonomous car venture had to deal with a major setback when its test car collided with a bus. Astonishingly, almost three weeks after the accident took place, the company has been successful in getting a patent that will enable its self-driven cars to locate school buses in the vicinity.

The time to secure a patent of this nature is quite ideal for the company. However, the company claims that it has no such association with the accident that occurred. It is their initiative to make their cars safer. The search engine giant had been working on the technology for quite some time now. The patent was filed almost two years back and got approved on March 8, 2016. The news surfaced by the newsletter of Future of Transportation. The patent basically references to a multi-layer system that will analyze in the basis of signage, color, size along with the complete structure of the car to gauge if it is a school bus.

Google cares about the safety of children thus this is not the first time when they are working on a project of this nature. Last year, during Halloween, the company enhanced its self-driven prototype vehicles to locate children even when they are attired in rather unfamiliar dressing code. On October 31, 2015 when children were all dressed rejoicing Halloween at Mountain View- the testing platform for the company, the tech giant allowed the families to get hands on experience with the cars to “give the software extra practice at recognizing children in all their unique shapes and sizes.”

As per the company it is harder to predict the behavior of children thus the software is tailored in a manner that ensures extra precautionary measures are taken.

Since the time the accident took place, the autonomous cars had to deal with a lot of criticism regarding its credibility. Many ignore the good traits and record of these cars. The cars have surfaced on the roads for testing and have successfully covered 1.45 million miles in the self-driving mode since the program began in FY09.

It is a great breakthrough for the company since they are the only ones successful in reaching a modified stage in terms of self-driven cars production. The companies rival in this domain such as Apple Inc. and Ford Motors are still quite behind by just managing to be in the planning phase. The industry giant’s like Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and executives belonging to Google have timely mentioned that autonomous cars will hit the roads in the fiscal year of 2020. Thus, there is not much time before we see these self-driven cars being used by the masses.

The technology is rather futuristic and there are several reservations associated to it which makes it under immense scrutiny all the time. However, the company is gradually overcoming all the obstacles that come its way so that they can achieve their goal of transforming the automotive industry in the times to come.