Ford Announces $1 Billion Investment in Argo AI to Help With Driverless Vehicle Development
Ford Motor Company has announced that it will invest $1 billion in an artificial intelligence company called Argo AI over the next five years.
Together, Ford and Argo AI will look to develop a virtual driver system for Ford’s fully autonomous, SAE level 4-capable vehicles, which Ford hopes to have on the roads by 2021.
According to Ford, the virtual driver system will serve as the “brains, eyes, ears and senses” of its autonomous vehicles.
“The next decade will be defined by the automation of the automobile, and autonomous vehicles will have as significant an impact on society as Ford’s moving assembly line did 100 years ago,” says Mark Fields, Ford’s President and CEO, through a company press release.
“As Ford expands to be an auto and a mobility company, we believe that investing in Argo AI will create significant value for our shareholders by strengthening Ford’s leadership in bringing self-driving vehicles to market in the near term and by creating technology that could be licensed to others in the future.”
Argo AI was founded last year by Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander, both of whom are alumni of the Carnegie Mellon National Robotics Engineering Center. Salesky, Argo AI’s CEO, previously worked with self-driving vehicles through Google’s Waymo company, while Rander, Argo AI’s COO, previously worked with Uber performing the same kind of engineering.
When speaking about the partnership, Salesky said, “we are energized by Ford’s commitment and vision for the future of mobility, and we believe this partnership will enable self-driving cars to be commercialized and deployed at scale to extend affordable mobility to all.”
The technology that Argo develops will initially be exclusive to Ford, but down the line, the company will have opportunities to license the technology to other automakers, according to the Associated Press.
