Automakers On The Road To Self-Driving Cars

The 2013 Fusion can’t drive itself (yet) but the fact that Ford is now packing radar, sensors and cameras in even a mid-market sedan is another sign that automakers are headed down the highway towardGoogle’s vision of driverless driving.

“They’re really stretching us as an industry,” said Ford chief technology officer Paul Mascarenas Tuesday of Google’s experiments with self-driving cars that have logged some 300,000 miles.

Mascarenas was in San Francisco to unveil the new Ford Fusion, and given the proximity to Silicon Valley the focus was on the technology the automaker is deploying as it takes on the Honda Accord, Toyota Camry and other bland but big-selling sedans.

Radar embedded in the front of the Fusion sweeps the road ahead and when the adaptive cruise control is activated the car automatically slows down as it approaches another vehicle within a certain distance and then speeds up when the gap widens. The radar also detects potential collisions, flashing a warning on the windshield while preparing the brakes for a sudden stop.

Another system uses cameras to detect when the car begins to drift, emits a warning and can automatically steer the car back into the lane. Rear radar detects when a vehicle has entered the Fusion’s blind spots and flashes a message on the appropriate side mirror.

The parallel parking feature uses ultrasonic sensors to look for suitable parking and automatically steers the car into the space. Altogether the Fusion boasts 70 microprocessors and 74 sensors that produce 4,700 signals within the vehicle.

“That’s 25 gigs of data per hour being generated,” said Mascarenas during a discussion with Steven Shladover, a research engineer at the University of California, Berkeley‘s Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology program.

Ford markets this technology as safety and convenience features. But Shladover wondered if the automaker was actually preparing customers to get used to cars that increasingly drive themselves.

“The logical extensions of these features is giving them more and more functionality and moving into more and more automatic driving features,” replied Mascarenas.

But whether automakers end up replicating Google’s self-driving system depends on cost and other factors, he added.

“It comes to the affordability question and the ability to democratize technology and also the real world environment you’re driving in,” Mascarenas said.

That future is on its way, however.

As my colleague Joann Muller wrote recently, Ford and other automakers are participating in a pilot program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation to test vehicle-to-vehicle communication technology. Cars would alert each other of traffic jams and accidents while also talking to stoplights and other transportation infrastructure, alerting drivers and perhaps one day taking over the controls themselves.