When Ford entered the self-driving car race in 2017, investing its first billion dollars in start-up Argo AI, the automaker planned to bring hands-free all-wheel drive to market as early as 2021. years have passed and the return to reality is tough. Robot taxis accumulate bugs and cars without a steering wheel are always a terra incognita.
In October, Ford announced, like Volkswagen, its withdrawal from the promising start-up. A slate of 2.7 billion dollars (2.6 billion euros), which plunged the quarterly accounts of the American group, with a loss of 827 million dollars. “Producing cost-effective, fully autonomous vehicles at scale is a long way off, and we won’t necessarily have to create this technology ourselves,” notes Jim Farley, the boss of Ford.
The firm of Dearborn (Michigan), near Detroit, is not a special case. Aurora Innovation, a young shoot linked to Volvo, is in bad shape, while the driverless car project developed by Audi has been stopped in order to be integrated into the Volkswagen group, which is about to review its strategy in depth.
For its part, Apple is slowing down the pace and considers that it will be necessary to wait until 2026 at the earliest to see its autonomous vehicle project – which it plans to charge a little less than 100,000 dollars, according to the magazine. Automotive News – take shape, despite an annual investment of 1 billion dollars.
Technical blockages
In total, according to the Bloomberg agency, 75 billion dollars have been invested in development programs for autonomous vehicles, mainly from American manufacturers and German firms. For results which the least we can say is that they are slow to materialize. “The research and development efforts around the autonomous car are colossal for benefits that are not significant. In fact, manufacturers understand that the game is not worth the candle”underlines Eric Espérance, specialist in automotive issues at Roland Berger.
In San Francisco, General Motors Cruise robo-taxi sometimes stop at intersections, block traffic or cause skirmishes
If so-called level 3 driving (which allows you to let go of the steering wheel, while remaining able to regain control of the vehicle at any time) is starting to become a reality on certain very high-end models (but below 60 km /h and on very specific sections), level 4 (full autonomous driving, without driver) is part of a very uncertain horizon.
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