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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.
Permanently
They just announced the only thing they're sticking with is the Mustang, the F-150s and bunch of SUVs.
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.
That's an interesting question. My guess is salaries and management structure. Salaries at Ford are linked to your grade, and the brackets for each grade are fixed. So if you want to bring a rock star on board, you have to give them a high grade. Later on when they want to move around there will be no positions they have the training or experience for outside of their field.
Risk avoidance could be part of it. If there is a class action perhaps it would be FAV that gets hit with a penalty sufficient to damage the business, That doesn't seem likely to me, the parasites will go after the deepest pockets.