Skip to main content

Ford’s autonomous cars are rolling into Europe next year

Ford autonomous car
Stephen Edelstein/Digital Trends
Ford is planning to take its self-driving car technology onto European roads next year as part of its ambitious plan to launch a fully autonomous car for ride-hailing services by 2021.

Trials will start at its Engineering Center in Essex, U.K., followed by additional testing at its Research & Advanced Engineering facilities in both Aachen and Cologne in Germany, the car giant told TechCrunch this week.

Recommended Videos

Ford said the teams at the testing locations are already up to speed with the company’s autonomous driving technology, which made choosing the new sites easy.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

Commenting on the announcement, Ford’s Thomas Lukaszewicz said the broad range of traffic conditions in countries across the pond will help the company to hone its technology.

“It’s important that we extend our testing to Europe,”Lukaszewicz said. “Rules of the road vary from country to country here; traffic signs and road layouts are different, and drivers are likely to share congested roads with cyclists.”

The American automaker is already testing its autonomous technology in the U.S. with the aim of launching a self-driving car for ride-hailing services five years from now. The company hopes the Europe-based testing will help pave the way for similar services on the continent soon after.

The grand plan is to mass produce an SAE Level 4 self-driving vehicle within five years. For those unfamiliar with SAE levels, “0” is for a car with no automation at all while “5” is fully automated. So Ford’s car will be pretty much completely autonomous, though driver intervention may be required in particularly adverse weather conditions or unusual environments.

For its on-road tests the company has been using Ford Fusion Hybrid cars kitted out with a slew of sensors and cameras. The vehicle looks pretty much like any other Fusion Hybrid but for the spinning lidar units on its roof.

DT’s Stephen Edelstein recently experienced a ride in Ford’s autonomous prototype – find out what he made of it here.

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