Ford COO Kumar Galhotra announced that Ford will be turning off some of its self-parking features to make savings across the company.
Ford has a number of autonomous parking features, all based on its Active Park Assist, which first entered the market about 10 years ago.
With numerous generations coming on the road, the technology aimed to take the stress out of parallel parking situations, with the vehicle first detecting a suitable space using onboard cameras and sensors, and then taking over driving tasks, including accelerating and brake, to guide autonomously. the car inside.
“Connected vehicle data here is very important because it helps us see what we offer, whether customers are using it or not,” Galhotra said during a conference call last week, according to a Bloomberg report.
“So one example is an automatic parking feature that allows the customer to parallel park automatically. Very, very few people are using it, so we can eliminate that feature. It costs about $60 per vehicle,” he added, referring to the savings that Ford can do. in every car when getting rid of the system.
Ford's COO went on to claim that the cumulative savings amount to around $10m a year (£8m/AU$15.5m), although the figure may be as high as $2bn (1 .6 billion pounds sterling / 3 billion Australian dollars) when considering the broader manufacturing, transportation and materials costs involved in producing and supplying a technology like this.
However, Galhotra did not mention the precise name of the technology he planned to remove, nor whether other autonomous functions, such as adaptive cruise control (which uses a similar sensor suite) would be affected by the removal of “self-parking functions.” “. “.
Currently Active Park Assist can be found in models such as the electric Ford Mustang Mach-E, the F150 pick-up truck and the Escape compact SUV. However, no timeline has been mentioned for phasing out the system.
The great autonomous debate
Ford has addressed a very interesting topic around high levels of automation in modern vehicles, being one of the first manufacturers to ask the question: “Does anyone actually use this?”
Although the marketing hype surrounding any new car suggests that innovations like BMW's Reverse Assist save lives (the system remembers the last few meters of the road in case you need to automatically reverse), there is no real evidence to suggest that be good , or if customers use them a lot.
Personally, most of the systems I've tried recently are slow and clunky, often missing spaces and taking too long to perform the maneuver in question. Many times, I have turned off the system and taken control mid-reverse parking situation to avoid the embarrassment of other motorists assuming I can't drive or causing a traffic jam in a multi-story parking lot.
In this case, Ford is using data from its connected cars to research the features its customers really want and need. Although removing the hardware behind Ford's Active Park Assist means the company also can't offer the functionality as an on-demand subscription package, as many manufacturers have suggested will happen with future in-car technology.
In any case, if you help Ford keep the unit cost of its vehicles low, you also pass the savings on to the customer, which will only bolster consumer confidence in the current climate of overtly expensive electric vehicles.
Perhaps it's best to leave autonomous functionality until cars can actually drive themselves. Meanwhile, everything else is a bit useless and clunky.
