Gadgetory

afford we've been focusing on developing autonomous vehicles for more than a decade because for us it is very serious work and you can see that in the millions of Ford vehicles already on the road with driver assisted semi autonomous technologies and the increasing levels of safety and convenience that we deliver every year for our customers now this is a stepping stone approach to fully autonomous driving and it's the prevailing approach in the industry but there's much more to ford's autonomous vehicle plan we're approaching autonomous vehicles with a dedicated research and development team working on fully autonomous driving much like we're seeing from the technology companies and this summer in fact we move from the research phase of autonomous vehicle development to advanced engineering and today we're taking another big step forward in making fully autonomous vehicles a reality and to share more details I'd like to invite Raj Nair our chief technical officer to join me Raj so today we're announcing that Ford is tripling the size of our autonomous vehicle testing fleet and we're accelerating our on-road testing to further advance our own self-driving or virtual driver software capability we'll have about 30 Fusion Hybrid autonomous vehicles on roads and test tracks in California Arizona Michigan including the all-new M City a simulated urban environment at the University of Michigan this gives us the automotive industry's largest autonomous vehicle development fleet accumulating miles and real-world testing and further honing our software and today we're announcing that we're equipping our third generation fleet of autonomous fusion hybrids with the most advanced lidar from vela dean the new solid-state hybrid ultra puck auto sensor and this is also valid inés third generation technology and as you can see here they've made significant progress in advancing the technology especially in terms of the size you can see here on the stage the first generation lidar that we use on our DARPA challenge effort with the Super Duty the second-generation lidar in the middle is now installed on our fusion hybrids and we use four of them on every car and here is the all-new puck you know this all new sensor technology is elegant and design but it makes a huge impact in how it helps advance our autonomous driving technology they're named the ultra puck because they're the shape of a hockey puck and fit into the cars sideview mirrors that are developed specifically for automotive use extending the sensor range by 200 meters versus the last generation and these sensors provide even better precision which is critical for mapping and creating accurate 3d models of the environment