Ford’s Road to Full Autonomy — NewCo Shift

Ford CEO Mark Fields explains the company's plan to make fully autonomous vehicles available in a ride-hailing or -sharing service within 5 years; also see Ford Promises Fleets of Driverless Cars Within Five Years (NYT)

"As little as four years ago, our approach was aligned with the thinking of most automakers today, which is taking incremental steps to achieve full autonomy by advancing driver assist technology. This is not how we look at it today. We learned that to achieve full autonomy, we’d have to take a completely different pathway.
So, we abandoned a stepping-stone approach and created a dedicated “top down” engineering program to deliver fully autonomous vehicles and the new mobility solutions and business opportunities that a fully autonomous vehicle could deliver."

Ford’s Road to Full Autonomy — NewCo Shift