Monday 31 October 2016

Why Ford, Lincoln, and Lexus Testers Rule the Self-Driving Roost

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Uber autonomous Ford Fusion

Dozens of established carmakers, technology companies, and startups are working furiously on autonomous vehicles. But if you look at the cars that are actually driving themselves on roads today, just two models are miles ahead: the Lexus RX450 and the Ford Fusion, with its sibling, the Lincoln MKZ.

Public records sourced from the California Department of Motor Vehicles show the Ford Fusion and the Lexus RX450h make up 80 percent of self-driving cars that are not vehicles being tested by their own manufacturers. Nationwide, the figures are harder to come by. Going by publicly available information, the Fusion and the RX450h roughly account for more than a third of all autonomous test cars in the United States.

Leading the Lexus camp is Google, with the largest total of self-driving cars: 24 RX450hs and 34 of its own prototypes. Zoox, a Silicon Valley startup aiming to make a fully autonomous vehicle for ride sharing, also uses a Lexus crossover for testing.

“There are no other OEMs that are currently so open to work through third parties.”

– Bobby Hambrick, CEO, AutonomouStuff

It comes as no surprise that Ford itself uses a pair of Fusions for experimenting with autonomous driving in the Golden State, but so does Udacity, an online educational organization that has just launched a nine-month “nanodegree” program to train engineers in self-driving technology. Two other Silicon Valley startups, Faraday Future and Drive.ai, rely on the Lincoln MKZ for their autonomous road tests, as does the Chinese tech company Baidu.

Outside California, self-driving Lincoln MKZs also can be found in New Jersey through Nvidia, the graphics and computing company, and Ford Fusions in Illinois, where AutonomouStuff, a provider of components for self-driving cars, tests them mostly away from public roads. In Pittsburgh, Uber is using at least 14 more Fusions as part of its pilot self-driving-taxi program.

Ford Fusion snow autonomous

But why are these models so popular when there are so many other vehicles available? The Tesla Model S, for example, has a modern electric drivetrain and plenty of space and power for the sensors and computers that all experimental vehicles need. It also comes with radar and cameras built in. But apart from Tesla itself, only Bosch is using a single Model S to develop next-generation driving technologies.

The answer, for the Lexus at least, was almost accidental. When Anthony Levandowski was building Google’s first self-driving cars, he chose a Toyota Prius because it had an easily accessible drive-by-wire system.

Levandowski, now VP of self-driving technology at Uber, explained why Google moved to the Lexus in 2012: “The Prius fleet was aging. We wanted vehicles that you could take to more places, including four-wheel drive because we wanted to test in the snow,” he said. “The RX450h is a great Tahoe vehicle, and electrically, it’s exactly the same as a Prius. A Prius and a Lexus are the basically the same car from a hackability standpoint.”

Lexus 450h autonomous Google

The popularity of the Fusion is also all about hackability, said Bobby Hambrick, CEO of AutonomouStuff. He noted that Ford is almost unique in exploring collaborations with outside companies. “Ford worked with a small engineering firm we hired, to put together hardware [and] software to interface with the native system in the car. There are no other OEMs that are currently so open to work through third parties,” Hambrick said, “and we’ve talked to many of them.”

The Fusion also allows electronic drive-by-wire control of all the key driving functions without extra hardware. “A lot of cars [do this] nowadays, but most of them aren’t rated to be driven on the road—they’re only meant for self-parking or lane keeping,” Hambrick said. “Just hacking into a car doesn’t mean you’re doing it safely. The MKZ/Fusion is one of the rare ones that is continuously rated for full self-driving, so it won’t fail when you’re driving down the highway.”

Oliver Cameron, who leads the self-driving-car team at Udacity, agreed. “We chose the Lincoln MKZ because of our ability to control the vehicle programmatically,” he said. “We can fit a drive-by-wire kit to send commands like steering, acceleration, braking, and more. Only certain vehicles can be hooked into like this.”

The Fusion’s hackability may have been a convenient coincidence, but Ford’s welcoming attitude is no accident. At a conference in September, Ford CEO Mark Fields said: “We are rethinking our entire business model. It’s no longer about how many vehicles we can sell; it’s about what services we can provide. We believe that the next decade is going to be defined by the automation of the automobile.”

As today’s startups mature into businesses making their own self-driving vehicles, Ford and Toyota should be well placed to turn today’s experiments into tomorrow’s strategic partnerships. But they should not expect to have the field to themselves for long.

“While we’re talking about cars that are easy to hack, the Nissan Leaf has one analog wire you can splice into and send commands over,” said Uber’s Anthony Levandowski. “That’s an awesome thing to have.”

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