Auto Tech: Ford Autonomous Driving

Article  and photos by Jacob Black

It’s just a balloon. But it’s a really big balloon. And it looks a lot like a Ford Transit van, and it is directly in front of me, stopped. I’m closing in on it at 80 km/h.

A red light flashes in the screen, loud beeping reaches a crescendo in my ears, my passengers and I brace…  and suddenly, I’m alongside the Ford Transballoon. The Ford Focus underneath me has realized I’m not reacting and taken matters into its own hands. Within milliseconds the car has come alive, scything left and then braking, all by itself.

It is a frightening and humbling experience to “drive” a car with capabilities like this. Humbling, because I’m in awe of what it could do, humbling because the steering inputs and braking inputs are so precise that I myself could never match them – the car is better at avoiding the crash than I am. Frightening because if the car can do all of those things through electronics, what happens if the car decides to do something you don’t want it to? Or worse, what if someone hacks your car? Or worse again, what if governments gain the ability to take control over every single car on the road anytime they like?

Ford Autonomous Driving. Click image to enlarge

The truth is those questions all need to be answered, and Ford’s think tanks are doing just that, as we speak. It’s questions like those, and others that are being thrashed out by lawmakers, policy makers and automotive manufacturers in a mad scramble to catch up to the capability that is almost already here.

The automatic collision avoidance is just one part of a puzzle that Ford, and every other brand, is not-so-slowly putting together – a move towards autonomous driving. Not long after this session, we tried Ford’s adaptive cruise control systems and active lane-keeping systems, successfully completing a loop of the Dearborn test oval behind another car using just those systems. It was a little bit odd testing out adaptive cruise-control on the track, especially given we have cars with full start-stop abilities on the road already – Mercedes-Benz, BMW for example – but this is the test ground where Ford is working on their own version. It’s not a case of their system not being able to do it – we were shown that it actually can – but rather that the potential legal minefield if one of those systems is relied on by say, an idiot, is off-putting.

Ford Autonomous Driving. Click image to enlarge

So if that’s an off-putting legal minefield, imagine how difficult it will be when cars start talking to each other, and driving themselves. Every major manufacturer is working on an autonomous car, and Ford is no different. There are even some completing test runs on the roads as we speak. In a pre-Detroit gab-fest, Ford presented us with an autonomous Fusion, complete with lidar (a remote sensing technology that measures distance by illuminating a target with a laser and analyzing the reflected light) scanners and radars and other techno gadgets designed to keep it from driving into the crowd of a hundred odd automotive journalists.

The Fusion’s lidar scanners and guidance systems were plugged into the monitor and projected onto a large screen so we could all see what the systems produced. It was impressive to see individual arms shooting into the air in real time, all rendered via the Fusion’s lidar “eyes” and computer systems.

The fact of the matter is, autonomous cars could easily be in the mainstream within a decade, the ability for cars to operate on their own is there, the ability for cars to avoid crashes is there, hell, cars can even speak to each other to let each other know what they’re doing (though hopefully not to tell the other cars what their occupants are doing…) as they tootle along. So where is my crash-proof car already?

For that you need to answer a raft of questions, but some of the bigger ones include:
1. Will people actually want to buy one? Some humans like to control things, play with things, use things – but some humans like to sit back and do other things while in transit – which group is larger?
2. What happens if one crashes – who pays the insurance bill? Anyone remember Toyota’s cruise-control court case?
3. Is it even legal? Our whole system of road and traffic laws is built on the assumption a human is in control/not adequately in control of a car – if the car is autonomous, does that mean we can all drink-drive like it’s 1968 again?

It is questions like that which will shape how quickly, or if ever, we’ll get crash-proof cars on the roads – we have the technology.