What they’re proposing isn’t really a car, as it will have no physical controls whatsoever
Ford has officially announced its 2021 goal of being a major player in the ride sharing scene and so it’s developing what the Society of Automotive Engineers calls a level 4 vehicle. What that basically entails is that it can not only drive itself, but also come without any kind of steering, brake or throttle input.
What the Blue Oval is saying, is that by the year 2021 it will have developed a fully autonomous pod that will be integrated into sharing services, a pod which will not have the option to be manually controlled at all.
Mark Fields, the CEO of Ford, announced “The next decade will be defined by automation of the automobile, and we see autonomous vehicles as having as significant an impact on society as Ford’s moving assembly line did 100 years ago. We’re dedicated to putting on the road an autonomous vehicle that can improve safety and solve social and environmental challenges for millions of people – not just those who can afford luxury vehicles.”
In order to achieve its self-imposed deadline, Ford will be enlisting the help of four startup companies: Velodyne (LiDAR sensor and light detector specialists), SAIPS (AI specialists), Nuremberg Neuroscience LLC (a company that “cracked the neural code the eye uses to transmit visual information to the brain” and Civil Maps (specializing in high-res 3D mapping).
The company will also add two new buildings to its Silicon Valley campus located in Palo Alto. The extra floorspace will accommodate additional laboratories and the plan is to increase the size of the complex even more in the medium term.