It's full steam ahead with self-driving cars at Ford, which today announced it has selected a director of autonomous vehicle development.
Randy Visintainer, who has been with the auto maker for almost three decades, will oversee phase two of a three-phase effort to bring self-driving cars to market.
Autonomous vehicles now move from research to advanced engineering. "The team now is working to make the required sensing and computing technology feasible for production and continuing testing and refinement of algorithms," Ford said, with the help of the Ford Research and Innovation Center in Palo Alto, which opened earlier this year.
"During the next five years, we will move to migrate driver-assist technologies across our product lineup to help make our roads safer and continue to increase automated driving capability," Raj Nair, Ford group vice president of Global Product Development, said in a statement. "At the same time, we are working to make sure those features and the whole way you shop for, buy and own a Ford vehicle provides an outstanding customer experience."
In the meantime, Ford said it plans to roll out pedestrian detection technology currently available on the Ford Mondeo in Europe to most Ford products by 2019.
The news comes after Ford Motor Co. Executive Chairman Bill Ford last year said he was concerned that some of the new technologies—like vehicle-to-vehicle communication—will scare consumers away. "A lot of this really cool technology … kind of freaks some people out," Ford said in the fall.
Ford hasn't been shying away from the technology, though. In January 2014, it teamed up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University to work on automated car tech.
If Ford doesn't follow through, somebody else certainly will. Earlier this month, The Guardian reported that Baidu, which has been working on autonomous vehicles for the past few years and recently partnered with BMW, plans to put self-driving cars on public roads in China by the end of the year. But just for testing.
Volvo, however, will provide self-driving cars to 100 of its customers in Gothenburg, Sweden by 2017 so they can test them out on public roads.