Ford says its Active Drive Assist system can drive hands-free on more than 100,000 kilometers of divided highways in the US and Canada.
Ford
Ford Motor followed Tesla in many ways when it comes to the Mustang Mach-E, its new battery-powered vehicle, but CEO Jim Farley took to Twitter on Thursday to show that Ford is nothing like Tesla when it comes to when testing driverless technology using clients like Guinea. pigs on public roads.
In a tweet about Ford’s upcoming hands-free highway management system, Farley said: “BlueCruise! We’ve tested it in the real world so our customers don’t have to.”
The message was a raid on Tesla and CEO Elon Musk.
In October 2020, Tesla introduced a beta or incomplete version of its premium driver assistance system that the company markets to customers as ‘Full Self-Driving’ or FSD.
Only some customers who purchase the FSD option will have access to the beta version to try out the latest features added to the system before working out any errors. The company revealed that it had previously rolled out FSD beta to 2,000 drivers, but revoked access for some drivers who allegedly did not pay proper attention to the road.
In its latest update, via Twitter, Musk said on April 9 that Tesla “Almost ready with FSD Beta V9.0. Step change improvement is great, especially for odd angles and bad weather. Pure visibility, no radar.”
Despite its brand name, the FSD system is unable to control a Tesla vehicle in all normal driving conditions. Tesla told the California DMV late last year, according to records obtained by CNBC and others, that “neither Autopilot nor FSD Capability is an autonomous system.”
Tesla has been criticized for branding Full Self Driving in the US, and a German court has banned Tesla from using the terms Autopilot and Full Self-Driving in advertising because they exaggerate the capabilities of a Tesla vehicle.
There have also been several recent accidents involving Teslas, leading to federal investigations into whether driver assistance technology may have contributed to or caused the collisions. The National Road Safety Administration said last month that it had opened 27 investigations into accidents involving Tesla vehicles, 23 of which remain active, according to Reuters.
According to Ford, its BlueCruise system will be launched later this year on the Ford F-150 and 2021 Mustang Mach-E in 2021 after more than 500,000 miles of development testing and refinement.
Ford’s system, like General Motors’ Super Cruise, promises less capabilities than Tesla’s FSD system. But Fords will not require drivers to ‘check in’ by touching the steering wheel. Instead, a camera system in the vehicle monitors the driver’s eyes and attention to the road.
The use of Ford and GM systems is also limited to certain pre-mapped highways in the US and Canada. Tesla does not restrict the use of Autopilot and FSD or FSD beta in the same way.