Ford engineers falling asleep at the wheel – level 3 autonomy ditched

Ford has denied reports quoting the company’s executive vice president of product development and chief technical officer, Raj Nair, as saying that its engineers were falling asleep while testing autonomous vehicles, although it has confirmed that it will not offer SAE Level 3 vehicles. “These are trained engineers who are there to observe what’s happening,” Nair told Bloomberg. “But it’s hu
February 21, 2017 Read time: 1 min
278 Ford has denied reports quoting the company’s executive vice president of product development and chief technical officer, Raj Nair, as saying that its engineers were falling asleep while testing autonomous vehicles, although it has confirmed that it will not offer SAE Level 3 vehicles. In a statement it said the initial reports were inaccurate and sought to clarify its decision not to offer Level 3 vehicles.

The statement said: “We believe that high levels of automation without full autonomy capability could provide a false sense of security, and that this presents a challenge for the driver to regain full awareness and control of the vehicle if a situation arises where the technology cannot function.  That is why we’re currently pursuing SAE Level 4 autonomous capability that will take the driver completely out of the driving process in defined areas.”
Location Based Systems

Related Content

  • March 14, 2017
    Drivers need clarity on liability with automated vehicles, says FIA
    FIA Region I recently presented the consumer view on liability and automated driving at the Driving Future platform, where it stressed the need to increase consumer confidence in driverless technologies by guaranteeing safety and swift compensation for traffic victims. FIA believes the transition to fully autonomous vehicles will take time, during which different levels of automation will coexist on our roads, creating challenges for the current insurance model. It says there must be differentiation
    Read More
  • March 17, 2017
    Europe’s road safety gains have stagnated EU
    Europe will fail to meet its road death targets as enforcement budgets are slashed and drivers face an epidemic of distractions. The European Union will not achieve its aim of halving the number of people killed on its roads each year by 2020, delegates to Tispol’s (the organisation of European traffic police) annual conference in Manchester were told. “The target will be missed because there was only a 17% decrease in road fatalities across Europe between 2010 and 2015 when [the rate of reduction] should h
    Read More
  • May 30, 2013
    Communication: the future of machine vision
    Jason Barnes asks leading machine vision industry figures what they consider to be the educational barriers to the technology’s increased uptake by the ITS sector. The recent rush by some organisations within the ITS sector to associate themselves with the term ‘machine vision’ underlines just how important the technology has become in a relatively short space of time. However, despite the technology having been applied in certain traffic management applications for some years, there remains a significant s
    Read More
  • December 6, 2012
    Debating the future of in-vehicle systems
    Industry experts talk to Jason Barnes about the legislative situation of current and future in-vehicle systems. Articles about technology development can have a tendency to reference Moore’s Law with almost indecent regularity and haste but the fact remains that despite predictions of slow-down or plateauing, the pace remains unrelenting. That juxtaposes with a common tendency within the ITS industry: to concentrate on the technology and assume that much else – legislation, business cases and so on – will m
    Read More

Highlighted Content