Best Self-driving Car: Ford Wins the Race
This year Navigant Research announced Ford as the leading company developing automated driving systems, leaving highly-buzzed Uber partner Volvo and Google’s self-driving car project Waymo behind. Surprisingly, Tesla has never made it to the top 10, regardless of the sound success at Tesla Model 3 presentation.
Ford has a long history pursuing autonomous vehicles, starting from 2005, according to Business Insider. This year, the company tripled the volume of it’s self-driving car testing, enhanced investment into AI and lidar technology, and expanded partnerships by joining efforts with car-sharing service Lyft. In 2017, the automaker announced a plan to roll out a fleet of fully driverless cars on the roads within the next 5 years.
How did it get here?
Navigant Research applied 10 basic criteria analyzing leading self-driving car makers…
vision
go-to-market strategy
partners
production strategy
technology
product capability
sales
marketing and distribution
product quality and reliability
product portfolio
staying power
Ford took the first place with solid remote-sensing lidar technology. It applies lasers and uses light reflection to allow a car to highly accurately position itself on existing maps and understand the world around it. Lidar is believed to be the best technology for self-driving cars so far.