"Ford Chief Executive Jim Hackett recently admitted that the company has “overestimated” the arrival of full self-driving vehicles. While speaking at the Detroit Economic Club on Tuesday, the Ford CEO noted that while the company’s first autonomous car is still coming in 2021, the applications of the vehicle’s self-driving technology will be limited.
“We overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles. Its applications will be narrow, what we call geo-fenced, because the problem is so complex,” the Ford executive said."
Ford is realizing that the self-driving car market is not as simple as it thought
I would venture that nobody, including Tesla, will actually get to true L4 autonomy anytime soon. FSD is indeed very very difficult. The fact that the leaders in self-driving who have the best self-driving test cars still say that they are not ready yet, should tell us something.
I think the real race is who can get the closest to L4 to the most cars on the roads. This is where I think Tesla is actually poised to do very well in this race. The traditional auto makers like Ford might have good self-driving test cars but they can't push the tech out quickly to the public. The best they can do is put the tech on next year's production models and hope the cars sell. Tesla has already deployed a very competent L2 driver assist to all their cars. And with OTA updates, Tesla can push new features to all the cars quickly, getting the cars a little bit closer to L4 each time. The fact is that Tesla does not really need to get to L4. They just need to develop better features and then push them to all their cars via OTA updates to gain an advantage over the competition. We are already seeing this happen now. Tesla improves Nav on AP, adds autosteer stop light warning and enhanced summon, and can push future updates like traffic light detection, and more, especially with AP3. Meanwhile, Ford says that they plan to have an "autonomous car" in 3 years but it will be limited.
“We overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles. Its applications will be narrow, what we call geo-fenced, because the problem is so complex,” the Ford executive said."
Ford is realizing that the self-driving car market is not as simple as it thought
I would venture that nobody, including Tesla, will actually get to true L4 autonomy anytime soon. FSD is indeed very very difficult. The fact that the leaders in self-driving who have the best self-driving test cars still say that they are not ready yet, should tell us something.
I think the real race is who can get the closest to L4 to the most cars on the roads. This is where I think Tesla is actually poised to do very well in this race. The traditional auto makers like Ford might have good self-driving test cars but they can't push the tech out quickly to the public. The best they can do is put the tech on next year's production models and hope the cars sell. Tesla has already deployed a very competent L2 driver assist to all their cars. And with OTA updates, Tesla can push new features to all the cars quickly, getting the cars a little bit closer to L4 each time. The fact is that Tesla does not really need to get to L4. They just need to develop better features and then push them to all their cars via OTA updates to gain an advantage over the competition. We are already seeing this happen now. Tesla improves Nav on AP, adds autosteer stop light warning and enhanced summon, and can push future updates like traffic light detection, and more, especially with AP3. Meanwhile, Ford says that they plan to have an "autonomous car" in 3 years but it will be limited.
