Over the next five years, Ford will pour $1 billion into an artificial-intelligence company tasked with developing the technology that one day will drive its autonomous vehicles.
In a phone call Friday, chief executive Mark Fields said the investment will help Ford bring its self-driving cars to market by the company’s previously stated goal of 2021. It also will open a new revenue stream if Ford licenses the technology to carmakers who have not developed their own autonomous driving systems.
That licensing model will put Ford in direct competition with Waymo, Google’s self-driving-car company, which announced plans this year to develop both hardware and software for self-driving cars. Previously, Waymo focused solely on software, but executives decided that it was necessary also to build the sensors and cameras on the vehicle if its system was to be sophisticated enough to handle fully autonomous driving.
During an interview at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit in January, Ford Chief Technical Officer Raj Nair said the company’s experience making vehicles will give it an advantage over Waymo and other competitors that do not have the same pedigree.
“We’ll see where they go with the autonomous vehicle,” Nair said in January. “The comment on doing both the hardware and the software is correct, but I think it’s pretty limiting if you don’t include the vehicle as hardware.
“The ability to integrate into the vehicle and be able to do the vehicle engineering is just as key,” Nair added. “It’s not going to be any good if the software program doesn’t know how to talk to the vehicle.”
Argo AI will have 200 employees by the end of this year, executives said. It also will have a headquarters in Pittsburgh, with additional offices in southeastern Michigan and the San Francisco Bay area.
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