Ford May Be On To Something In Deferring Level 5 Autonomy

Automotive strategists once talked about the evolution of all-electric vehicles (EVs) and completely autonomous vehicles (AVs) as tied firmly to one another. But Jim Farley has decided Ford can proceed with its transformation to an EV company without also trying to make sure no human has to drive its new vehicles.

“Things have changed,” Farley said in a Ford statement that accompanied the company’s third-quarter writeoff of $2.7 billion after deep-sixing its investment in Argo AI. “Profitable, fully autonomous vehicles at scale are a long way off and we don’t necessarily have to create the technology ourselves.”

That’s the exact opposite vision as the one cast by a Farley predecessor, Mark Fields, in 2016, when the then-CEO said, “Ford is going to be mass-producing vehicles with full autonomy in five years.” Fields was broomed out and was followed as Ford chief by Jim Hackett, who harbored similar visions. Now, Ford executives concede that fully autonomous vehicles are — well, at least five years away.

Both Ford and Argo’s other 40% partner, Volkswagen, said they would absorb some of the Argo workforce and continue some of Argo’s work, with Ford emphasizing improvements in its “Level 2” and “Level 3” automated-driving features.

Yet in delaying Ford’s investments in completely autonomous driving, or Level 5, Farley in some sense is simply saying the emperor has no clothes. It’s difficult to overstate the breathlessness with which autonomous-driving proponents advanced their vision and, over the period of just a few short years, got the auto industry and Silicon Valley to put into it what Bloomberg has estimated to be as much as $100 billion, and other estimates put at as high as $160 billion.

And the auto industry, including General Motors, will continue to pursue driverless driving, as will digital giants such as Apple and dozens of startups. Business applications such as autonomous trucks are well ahead of consumer vehicles.

Some think Ford is missing a bet. “When autonomy comes to fruition, and it will, the lack of Argo will matter naught,” Chris Thomas, co-founder and partner of the Detroit-based VC firm Assembly Ventures, and co-founder — with Ford Motor Executive Chairman Bill Ford — of the Fontinalis Partners investment firm, told me. “We’re going to have autonomous and self-driving systems that are broadly deployed across logistics and personal-mobility use cases and will unlock immense value for society and create immense value for everyone who is actually in the arena.”

But placing driverless vehicles to the side may be good for Ford at a time when the economic landscape has become challenging. “These aren’t consumer vehicles, and they won’t be for a very long time,” Doug Field, the chief advanced product and technology development officer for Ford’s Model e division, said on a recent podcast. “It’s going to take a lot of money to crack it.” Level 2 and 3 developments and “connected data” still give the industry “a lot we can do on safety to make people safer and safer,” added Field, a former Tesla and Apple executive who joined Ford last year and is the key manager of the company’s digital technologies in vehicles of the future.

And some of the goals of fully autonomous vehicles could be accomplished in other ways, such as shuttling people who need help in transportation. “Mobility for older, younger and handicapped people can be achieved with a service like Uber, if these services wouldn’t be too greedy to pay their driver a fair share,” the strategy chief for an automaker told me.

Ford’s abandonment of Argo also turns out to be a big blow against technological determinism. It’s no accident that initial enthusiasm for the “AV revolution” came from the young scientists and engineers who were invited to participate in successive Defense Research Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) contests beginning about 20 years ago, as Rita McGrath of consultancy Valize has pointed out.

One of DARPA’s goals was to create a “critical mass of talent focused on the challenge of autonomy, which it was interested in for military and defense purposes,” she noted. This “critical mass” quickly drew tech companies into the fray, and once automakers saw the digital titans invading their turf, they understandably jumped in as well.

But self-driving at scale remains a vision. “True autonomous driving is a long way in the future, as we don’t have the technology yet to handle what our brain is handling,” said the automaker strategy chief.

Besides the technology obstacles, there simply are too few clear advantages to such a future, too many potential disadvantages, and too many major obstacles — costs, liabilities and so on — in the way. Think of it as kind of on a parallel track with another intriguing but not exactly urgent goal of humanity: landing people on Mars.

Maybe part of the fading dream of a highly centralized transportation scheme, made up of millions of driverless pods traversing urban landscapes under the control of AI-powered computers, got discredited when Americans saw what resulted from centralized control of the economy during the pandemic, by government decision-makers, bureaucratic elites and “experts” in determining the public good.

Indeed, one of the biggest critiques of autonomous driving has come from Americans who want to continue to control their own vehicles because it gives them freedom, and by some who just enjoy driving. These people may continue to own the day. “It is hard for people to give up control of their automobiles,” Field said. “Everything that they’ve been taught says don’t do that.”