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Ford Makes Moves Towards Autonomy

Despite a few early hiccups, Ford is making great strides towards in the autonomous vehicle space with Latitude AI.
Created on March 3|Last edited on March 3

A New Name and a New Strategy

In 2017, Argo AI was a self driving startup that had received billions in investment from Ford and Volkswagen; however, the auto manufacturers cut ties with Argo last year and the company was forced to shut down. The investment in Argo reportedly costed Ford $2.7 billion, and was a big hit to the balance sheet.
Despite this, Ford is picking up where Argo left off, and has formed a wholly-owned subsidiary called Latitude AI, and will focus on building driver assistance systems. Latitude will be tasked with improving Ford’s existing self driving system, called Bluecruise. The company says it hopes to improve safety and enjoyability of Ford vehicles, and ultimately saving customers time on otherwise occupied time driving.

The Difficult Road forward

Ford recently filed for patents that will allow the car to repossess itself, disabling certain infotainment systems, and even lock you out of the car completely [2].
Based on the growing popularity of feature subscriptions, some of these features seem like a natural extension of this offering new business opportunities and environments to auto manufacturers.

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Tags: ML News
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