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Ford Plans To Spend $4 Billion On Autonomous Vehicles By 2023 (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Ford Motor plans to spend $4 billion through 2023 in a newly created LLC dedicated to building out an autonomous vehicles business. The automaker announced Tuesday it has created Ford Autonomous Vehicles LLC, which will house the company's self-driving systems integration, autonomous-vehicle research and advanced engineering, AV transportation-as-a-service network development, user experience, business strategy and business development teams. The $4 billion spending plan includes a $1 billion investment in startup Argo AI. The new LLC will be primarily based at Ford's Corktown campus in Detroit and will hold Ford's ownership stake in Argo AI, the company's Pittsburgh-based partner for self-driving system development.
For scale, that's similar to Tesla's total R&D budget on everything (batteries, motors, the overall car, autopilot, etc). It represents about 12% of Ford's total R&D.
Translation (as always): You no longer own or control the fundamental tools that you use to function in the world, and your entire life can (and will) be upended by anything from corporate whims to a short period of personal financial stress.
You can pry my Corolla from my cold dead hands.
When I worked there (in low-level electronics security) in 2014 and 2015, they said they'd have fully autonomous vehicles in 5 years. I used to laugh and laugh (while many of my coworkers actually bought into that koolaid). Just 2 more years, right, guys?
Good luck getting decent ai people to live in Detroit.
Chevrolet Bolt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Get S Korea to do the battery, motor, and drive unit.
Add a pretty GUI.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Does this mean they will not be buying self driving AI from Google? Which Google spent $1.1 billion on? No worries, I'm sure another car maker will use Google tech, just like Google is using search algorithms developed by Pep Boys.
Why do some of you think this wouldnâ(TM)t be a good thing for people of Detroit? They can learn
I plan to spend $4 Trillion to cure male pattern baldness by 2030.
With either plan and $5 you can get a cup of shitty coffee and Starsucks.
They just announced the only thing they're sticking with is the Mustang, the F-150s and bunch of SUVs.
Even if they released the tech tomorrow, it will be a decade before it's affordable enough for normal folks to even consider it. It's also a very disruptive
tech for established business models, so expect it to be hampered every step of the way by folks who have lots of money and influence.
Companies like to make ludicrous claims such as these all the time. Hell, my own company made claims of how amazing we are going to be by 2020
until ( as we are only 1.5 years out ) they have started to realize that reality has different plans. Grandiose transformations typically require grandiose
amounts of money to do it with. ( Which they're not willing to spend )
Guessing that ' amazing ' part may materialize by 2030 or maybe 2040. . . . . lol
Maybe
Moral of the story: I'll believe it when I see it.
True, but now that Ford have publicly committed to tossing that amount down the toilet, it will give smaller companies a better chance at competing.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Smells of risk avoidance if they spin out the company immediately. What other benefit is there?
A billion per year will get them about 6,000 engineers and coders in the area.
Let's assume they aren't great at hiring, so 20% of the engineers don't do anything more useful than filling out change forms and other paperwork for the decent engineers.
Assume 30% of them can do fairly simple tasks competently, such as writing a module according the requirements written by a more experienced person. That's 2,000 engineers doing the grunt work, basically competent coders, but don't deserve the "engineer" title.
35% know how to write requirements for a user story and can code it up.
10% come up with good approaches to interesting, but not terribly difficult, problems.
5%, or 300 of them, are very good. These are the people who come up with really good ideas that significantly improve the project.
Give me that team for five years and we'll come up with something pretty darn cool.
Looking at it another way, given 100 years to work on it, I could do it. 100 years is a long time. A hundred years of my time would cost them $15 million. They're spending $4 billion. They need to achieve 0.3% efficiency to pull it off.
I see the Bolt is Motor Trend's car of the year. I also notice it's currently outselling Tesla. I think this article is about autonomous vehicles, though.
I don't think it is really an apples-to-apples comparison though; what Ford calls R&D is generally heavily focused on development rather than research, and is done so for tax treatment.
Ford likely needs to spend significantly more to actually develop a marketable product from this investment.
On the other hand, Ford's R&D each year builds on all the R&D they've done over the last 115 years.
Elon Musk said their production was slowed because they are trying to figure out how to run an assembly line. They bought machines that were slower than doing it by hand, so they had to throw the machines away. Tesla is trying to figure out how you organize a line to produce 5,000 cars / week, Ford was doing that in 1913. Which puts Ford 105 years ahead of Tesla on the "how to make cars" thing, which is kinda important for a car company.
Thanks, Mr. President, for incentivizing business growth in distressed communities! Jobs, jobs, jobs!
They will not need 105 years to improve though. Unlike Ford, who is happy with just producing shit, the production goal is just a stepping stone to greater things.
There's running an assembly line, which Tesla has obviously mastered seeing how they made over 100.000 cars in 2017, and then there's running an assembly line at the speed Elon wants the Model 3 line to run at. To put it into perspective, a stable 5000 cars per week works out at about 260.000 cars a year, i.e about 2.5 times their total 2017 output for a single model even exceeds Porsche's 246.000 total production numbers for 2017.
Also, the "fluffbot" you're obviously referring to was just for one single part, a dampening mat between the battery and the body, that was then discovered to be unnecessary and dropped completely so the human replacements were also useless. Even your comparison to the Model T falls flat on it's face when you consider how much simpler it was, how it took 4 years of Model T production to break the 100.000 cars per year mark and how working conditions at the factory were so terrible (IIRC) about a half of new workers quit in the first few months and the only reason Ford was able to keep attract enough replacement workers was by paying them well above industry average salaries.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
My numbers figure for this kind of work, half the day expense is salaries.
Some people are good at physical sports, like football.
Some nerdy types spend their time getting really good at various table or computer games. Some people are really good artists.
I spend my time studying software engineering and law. I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't kick a ball, I CAN design a database.
Btw, I'm also old. I've been studying information systems for 30 years.
From an outsiders perspective, you are implying that somehow each engineer deserves $166,000 a year salary for effectively doing very little. Maybe it would simply be more efficient to spend about 10 million in university research grants and try to figure out how to get more productivity out of the engineers, or at least assess who actually deserves that kind of salary. By your own admission, clearly most of them do not.
From a societal perspective, I really question the value that you are assigning to these computer engineers to the world. I am really skeptical that more good is done by your "paper work people" than say, hiring 3 teachers, 4 social workers, 5 park rangers, or provide a full scholarships for a solid engineering education at say, the university of Illinois, for two kids. Or, if you want to stay in technology, I suspect that two mechanical engineers improving breaking systems or improving the car impact safety is probably more valuable than chasing a doodad that most people really are not asking for.
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
> you are implying that somehow each engineer deserves $166,000 a year salary for effectively doing very little.
That would neither be their salary, not did I say anything at all about deserving it. If someone costs the company $160K, their salary will be about $100K. Neither health insurance nor office space nor payroll taxes are free. Neither are the computers and other tools they use, nor the networks which connect them all, nor ...
> or provide a full scholarships for a solid engineering education at say, the university of Illinois, for two kids.
So youe thinking is having engineers working isn't that valuable, we should instead use the money to make more engineers? Who themselves should remain unemployed so we can use the money to train even more useless engineers, I suppose.
Based on your astute reasoning, I'm going to make a bold inference that you're a Bernie Sanders supporter.
> only reason Ford was able to keep attract enough replacement workers was by paying them well above industry average salaries
On Payscale.com I see that Tesla pays above industry average. :)
It's not like you can actually get away with paying people living in California the same wages you can pay in rust belt states and the south... In those places you don't even need to have pay raises keep pace with inflation.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."