Ford says the Active Drive Assist system allows hands-free driving on more than 100,000 miles of divided highways in the US and Canada.
Ford
Ford Motor followed Tesla in many ways when it came to its new battery-powered Mustang Mach-E, but CEO Jim Farley took to Twitter on Thursday to reveal that Ford is nothing like Tesla when it comes to testing technology driverless with clients like guinea. pigs on the road.
In a tweet about Ford’s upcoming hands-free highway system, Farley said, “BlueCruise! We’ve tested it in the real world so our customers don’t have to.”
The message was a shot at Tesla and CEO Elon Musk.
In October 2020, Tesla released a beta or unfinished version of its premium driver assistance system, which the company markets as “Full Self-Driving” or FSD for customers.
Only a few customers who purchase the FSD option will get access to the beta version to try out the latest features added to the system before all bugs are fixed. The company announced that it had previously rolled out FSD beta to 2,000 drivers, but was withdrawing access for a few drivers who reportedly aren’t paying close attention to the road.
In his most recent update, via Twitter, Musk said on April 9 that Tesla is “Almost done with FSD Beta V9.0. Improvement in incremental changes is huge, especially for weird corner cases and bad weather. Pure visibility, no radar.”
Despite its brand name, the FSD system is not capable of operating a Tesla vehicle under all normal driving conditions. Tesla told the California DMV late last year, according to data obtained by CNBC and others, that “neither Autopilot nor FSD Capability is an autonomous system.”
Tesla has been criticized for the Full Self Driving brand in the US, and a German court banned Tesla from using the terms Autopilot and Full Self-Driving in advertisements because they exaggerate the capabilities of a Tesla vehicle.
There have also been several accidents involving Teslas recently, prompting federal investigations that will determine whether driver assistance technology may have contributed to or caused the collisions. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said last month it had opened 27 investigations into crashes of Tesla vehicles, 23 of which remain active, Reuters said.
According to Ford, the BlueCruise system will be released on the 2021 Ford F-150 and 2021 Mustang Mach-E later this year after more than 500,000 miles of development testing and fine-tuning.
Ford’s system, like General Motors’ Super Cruise, promises fewer features than Tesla’s FSD system. But at Ford, drivers don’t have to “check in” by touching the steering wheel. Instead, a camera system in the vehicle monitors the driver’s eyes and his attention on the road.
Use of Ford and GM systems is also limited to certain pre-mapped highways in the US and Canada. Tesla does not restrict the use of Autopilot and FSD or FSD beta in the same way.