A drop in the bucket - $2.7 million. That's the size of a US Department of Energy grant to fund a University of Michigan study of driverless and connected vehicle energy consumption, human interaction, and vehicle speed and motion data.
Ford Motor Company continues to ride ahead of the conventional auto manufacturers in terms of its visions for driverless vehicles and how personal transportation will be transformed in the next decade. Now Ford's CEO, Mark Fields, is proclaiming in public that driverless vehicles will be on the roads in four years, something even Google has not declared.
Ford is the first company to be testing its autonomous cars at M City in Michigan. M City is kind of like a movie set/fake city/set of driving patterns and obstacles/testing ground. You won't be seeing Ford bots in Mountain View.
However, Ford is NOT necessarily envisioning fully driverless in four years and the company is not embracing the taxi bot/Uber model of shared vehicles. Fields thinks one obstacle is carrying car seats. Okay, maybe he hasn't considered that those can also be shared as well.
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