Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Cars
  3. News

Ford and VW close down Argo AI autonomous car unit

Trevor Mogg
By

Autonomous-car specialist Argo AI is closing down after Ford and Volkswagen, Argo’s main backers, ended support for the Pittsburgh-based company.

First reported by TechCrunch and later confirmed by the two auto giants, some of the 2,000 workers at Argo will transfer to Ford and Volkswagen, while others without an offer will receive a severance package. Argo’s technology is also set to end up in the possession of the two companies, though at this stage it’s not clear how it might be shared.

Recommended Videos

“In coordination with our shareholders, the decision has been made that Argo AI will not continue on its mission as a company,” Argo said in a statement on Wednesday. “Many of the employees will receive an opportunity to continue work on automated driving technology with either Ford or Volkswagen, while employment for others will unfortunately come to an end.”

Related

Ford said that for now, it intends to focus on developing driver assistance technology rather than aiming for full automation, which Argo was working on.

Jim Farley, Ford president, said on Wednesday that when the automaker invested in Argo and autonomous vehicles in 2017, it anticipated being able to bring to market by 2021 self-driving capabilities graded at Level 4, a level described as highly advanced and one grade short of the maximum Level 5, which offers full automation.

But in a strategic pivot, Farley said Ford is currently working on L2+ and L3 applications that “make transportation even safer.” He said he felt “optimistic about a future for L4 advanced driver assistance systems, but profitable, fully autonomous vehicles at scale are a long way off and we won’t necessarily have to create that technology ourselves.”

The Ford president confirmed that the automaker will hire engineers from Argo to expand and speed up the development of these opportunities. Meanwhile, German automaker Volkswagen said it will now shift its focus toward Cariad, its unit developing autonomous driving software.

In a statement, Oliver Bloom, the automaker’s CEO, said “focus and speed count” when it comes to developing future technologies, adding that Volkswagen’s goal is to give its customers “the most powerful functions at the earliest possible time and to set up our development as cost-effectively as possible.”

Argo was co-founded six years ago by Bryan Salesky, who came from Google’s autonomous-car unit that eventually became Waymo, and Peter Rander, who had earlier worked on Uber’s now-abandoned self-driving project.

Argo has been testing its autonomous vehicles in eight cities around the world, and in May it announced it had started testing fully driverless vehicles in Miami and Austin. It had also partnered with Walmart to test a driverless delivery service, and robotaxi services were in its sights, too.

Ford and Volkswagen’s Argo investments totaled $1 billion and $2.6 billion, respectively, but the two automakers have now concluded that the dream of fully autonomous vehicles is not worth chasing, at least for now.

The joint move is an indication of the pressures faced by firms in the autonomous-car industry, with large financial investments yet to lead to any meaningful revenue returns.

One of the industry leaders, Alphabet-owned Waymo, has been testing robotaxi services for paying customers in several U.S. cities since 2018, but local regulations and the technology’s careful development mean that progress on exiting pilots and rolling out such services more widely is slow.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
A weird thing just happened with a fleet of autonomous cars
A passenger getting into a Cruise robotaxi.

In what must be one of the weirder stories linked to the development of autonomous vehicles, a fleet of Cruise self-driving cars gathered together at an intersection in San Francisco earlier this week, parked up, and blocked traffic for several hours. And to be clear: No, they weren't supposed to do that.

Some observers may have thought they were witnessing the start of the robot uprising, but the real reason for the mishap was more prosaic: An issue with the platform's software.

Read more
Officers confused as they pull over an empty self-driving car
Cruise

In what appears to be the first incident of its kind, police officers recently pulled over a self-driving car with no one inside it.

The incident, which took place on a street in San Francisco earlier this month, was caught on video by a passing pedestrian. It shows several traffic cops pondering about how to handle the incident after stopping the vehicle for failing to have its front lights on while driving at night.

Read more
How a big blue van from 1986 paved the way for self-driving cars
Lineup of all 5 Navlab autonomous vehicles.

In 1986, a blue Chevy van often cruised around the streets of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania near Carnegie Mellon University. To the casual observer, nothing about it appeared out of the ordinary. Most people would pass by it without noticing the camcorder peeking out from its roof, or the fact that there were no hands on the steering wheel.

But if any passerby had stopped to inspect the van and peer into its interior, they would have realized it was no ordinary car. This was the world's first self-driving automobile: A pioneering work of computer science and engineering somehow built in a world where fax machines were still the predominant way to send documents, and most phones still had cords. But despite being stuck in an era where technology hadn't caught up to humanity's imagination quite yet, the van -- and the researchers crammed into it -- helped to lay the groundwork for all the Teslas, Waymos, and self-driving Uber prototypes cruising around our streets in 2022.

Read more