Ford is wasting no time revving up its new Silicon Valley skunkworks, announcing Tuesday the appointment of a company veteran to spearhead a push toward self-driving cars.
Randy Visintainer, a 29-year veteran most recently in charge of global product development, will lead Ford's autonomous vehicle development program, which is moving from being a research effort to an advanced engineering program.
The program will lean heavily on the company's Research and Innovation Center in Palo Alto, which CEO Mark Fields opened earlier this year with a commitment to boost staffers from 20 to around 200 by year's end.
The move is significant in that it represents a global automaker's commitment to a space currently dominated by tech-focused companies such as Google, a pioneer in the self-driving car arena, and now Uber, which recently made news by poaching a few dozen top engineers from Carnegie Mellon University , a longtime leader in robotic cars research. Uber had initially announced its intent to simply partner with the university.
A number of car companies are experimenting with variations of self-driving car tech, including Audi, which in January ferried journalists to the Consumer Electronics Show in a vehicle that handled most of the driving chores itself, most admit that their current aim is to build traditional cars with an array of driver assists as opposed to a vehicle with no driver involvement at all.
In contrast, Google is forging ahead with on-road tests of its new autonomous two-person cars this summer, although for testing purposes the vehicles will have temporary steering wheels and pedals for a test drivers while tooling around Mountain View, Calif.
While Ford execs aren't saying when they might have an autonomous car on the roads, clearly they're now solidly on that path.
"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, said in a statement.
Other key announcements from Ford's fifth annual trend conference, held at the Palo Alto offices: the availability next year of Pre-Collision Assist with Pedestrian Detection technology (the technology currently exists in European models); a ramped up partnership with Redwood City, Calif. -based Carbon 3D to accelerate the development of 3D-printed automotive parts, which are both strong and light as well as easy and quick to produce; and a retooled MyFord Mobile app that will be compatible with a range of smartphones.
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