Ford loses billions on autonomous cars start-up

This advanced feature promised to change the way we use cars forever, but it won’t be a reality any time soon.

Ford has put the brakes on its drive for autonomous vehicles, shutting down a self-driving car start-up that attracted significant investment from the blue oval.

The American auto giant says its decision to wind down the Argo AI autonomous vehicle research arm results in a “non-cash, pretax impairment on its investment” of $US2.7 billion ($4.2) billion.

Ford is winding down its Argo AI autonomous vehicle research division.

John Lawler, Ford’s chief financial officer, says “it’s become very clear that profitable, fully autonomous vehicles at scale are still a long way off”.

That’s a world away from the promises made by Ford’s then-chief executive Mark Field five years ago, who defended a $US1 billion investment in Argo AI by promising it would bring “self-driving vehicles to market in the near term” and create “technology that could be licensed to others in the future”.

An Argo AI modified Ford Motor Co. Fusion autonomous vehicle is seen driving along a street near the company's headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Photographer: Justin Merriman/Bloomberg

Argo AI promised to put fully self-driving cars on public roads, going well beyond the “BlueCruise” service Ford restricts to carefully chosen highways in the US. The company also had significant investment from Volkswagen, and its failure has shaken the perception of autonomous vehicle technology in the US.

Ford's BlueCruise highway driving assistant is geo-fenced to particular routes.

The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Wilmot writes that “the mood has soured sharply” surrounding the viability of self-driving car tech perpetually promising to be just around the corner.

Reuters reporter Paul Lienert writes that Argo’s failure will “pop the automated vehicle bubble”, as it “underscores the growing realisation that automated vehicles may be even further away from mass deployment”.

Ford's BlueCruise highway driving assistant is not available in Australia.

Daniel Etherington at TechCrunch has the blunt view that “it’s time to admit self-driving cars aren’t going to happen”, arguing that self-driving “isn’t going to be a thing A) in our lifetimes and B) with any kind of omnipresent scale”.

He’s not alone in that view.

Motor Trend’s Scott Evans wrote in July 2021 that “you cannot buy a self-driving car”.

“They don’t exist outside of the tech companies trying to develop them, and they likely won’t exist in public for many more years.”

Ford is winding down its Argo AI autonomous vehicle research division.

While rivals have lost billions in investment, General Motors’ Cruise and Google’s Waymo are pushing ahead with autonomous vehicle research.

Tesla also remains bullish on the prospect of increasingly advanced “full self driving” features within its “autopilot” option, even as Bloomberg reports that its leadership faces a criminal investigation surrounding “misleading claims about the capabilities of its Autopilot driver assistance system”.