cloud will coordinate things like identity verification and payment methods. Transportation modes in cities could work together, and Ford says it will optimize communications through C-V2X (cellular vehicle-to-infrastructure) technology that the company is working with Qualcomm to validate.
As described by Ford, C-V2X will enable “various technologies and applications in a city—vehicles, stoplights, signs, cyclists, and pedestrian devices—to speak to each other and share information.” The eventual goal is to have Ford’s partners, including Lyft, Postmates, and Domino’s, plug into the automaker’s autonomous fleet and use the cars for delivery or ride-hailing services.
Ford also announced that in 2018, it will expand testing of the autonomous vehicles it’sbuilding in partnership with ArgoAI; which city will host the testing is TBD.
—After years of turmoil, Visteon sees mobility as the road to profitability: Speaking of going all in on mobility, Tier 1 automotive supplier Visteon revealed more details about its DriveCore platform as part of its CES press push.
A few weeks ago, we reported on DriveCore’s testing at the American Center for Mobility, only seven miles down the road from Visteon’s Van Buren Township, MI, headquarters. Autonomous vehicles are part of a new identity for Visteon, which spun out of Ford in 2000, has struggled to find its footing over the years, experiencing high executive turnover, declaring bankruptcy, and dramatically scaling back some of its businesses along the way.
In 2015, Sachin Lawande left the tech industry to take over at Visteon’s helm. He quickly set about reorganizing the company’s technology strategy and workforce, and on executing on his vision of an automated future. So, what is DriveCore? We spoke to Upton Bowden, who handles advanced technology development for Visteon, to learn more.
Bowden described DriveCore as “an end-to-end autonomous vehicle platform.” It has three components. Compute is a modular, scalable hardware platform supporting Nvidia, Freescale, and Qualcomm, with other processors to come later; it can be adapted to all levels of autonomous driving (Level 0 is no automation and Level 5 is fully autonomous with no human driver). Runtime is “in-vehicle middleware” enabling sensor fusion and “providing a secure framework for applications and algorithms to communicate in real time” that can be upgraded as driverless technology matures. And Studio is a PC-based development tool automakers can use for simulation and analysis that “allows easy integration of third-party algorithms and access to real-life sensor data.”
Upton said the OEM-agnostic DriveCore platform is intended to develop a common framework to validate the safety of autonomous vehicles and push their mass commercialization. For the first time, Visteon was joined in its CES booth by some of its partners in developing autonomous technologies, which he called a big step forward.
“In my opinion, autonomous vehicles are too big a problem to solve completely in-house,” Upton added. “If you look at suppliers, you see a lot of acquisitions and a lot of noise, but it’s hard to gamble on which one to pick. Our product works with any kind of sensor and any kind of input, so we can work with anyone in the [mobility] space without alienating potential customers.”
—Aptiv (formerly Delphi) and Lyft bring autonomous taxis to the Las Vegas strip: Like Visteon, Dephi (now Aptiv) is a supplier undergoing a transformation thanks to the
