What You Need To Know About Ford's New Self-Driving Subsidiary "Latitude AI"

Ford Motor Company announced Thursday that it is taking another step toward becoming a true electric vehicle company.

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It has been announced that Ford has created a wholly-owned subsidiary called “Latitude AI,” which will work on developing what Ford calls a “hands-free, eyes-off-the-road automated driving system.”

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As part of its plans to develop automated driving technology, the company said that it is putting together a team of machine learning, robotics, software, sensors, systems engineering, and operations experts. Moreover, the team would also work on improving Ford BlueCruise, its hands-free highway driving feature, which allows the driver to remove their hands from the steering wheel in a hands-free "Blue Zone" when driving on the highway.

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In response to this, Doug Field, Ford's senior vice president for advanced product development and technology, said that he sees automated driving technology as an opportunity to redefine the relationship between people and their cars. Research firm INRIX, which specializes in transportation analytics, was cited in the company's report, which indicated that the average U.S. driver spends nearly 100 hours a year sitting in traffic.

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The use of Latitude would enable Ford to achieve its strategic goal of focusing on automated driving technologies for personally owned vehicles, which it began in 2022.

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A statement from Latitude said Sammy Omari, executive director, of ADAS Technologies at Ford, would serve as the CEO of the company and Peter Carr would assume the role of chief technology officer. David Gollob would be responsible for the day-to-day operations of the business, Ford said.

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In addition to its Pittsburgh headquarters, Latitude has engineering hubs in Dearborn and Palo Alto, as well as a highway-speed test track in Greenville, South Carolina. Tesla, Inc. recently announced the opening of its global engineering office in Palo Alto, California.

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The importance of Ford's intensifying focus comes as the automaker commits to making the transition towards electrification in the near future. EVs of the future will be capable of autonomous driving, and the pioneer of EVs, Tesla, for example, has its Autopilot system and is in the final stages of testing its full self-driving software suite. The CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk, has been claiming that the company hopes to achieve Level 4 autonomy with its FSD, even though many people believe that his claims are false.

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The BlueCruise by Ford and the Super Cruise by General Motors Corp are all said to qualify as Level 1 autonomous vehicles.

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Ford, on the other hand, reported that its February sales in 2022 grew from 129,273 units to 157,606 units, a 21.9% increase from the previous year. Month-over-month, sales increased a modest 7.7% compared with the same period last year.

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The number of EVs sold increased by 68.1% to 3,523 units, with 1,783 units of them being Mustang Mach-E plug-ins and 1,336 units being F-150 Lightning pickup trucks. The remaining 404 units were accounted for by E-Transit vans. For the month of February, pureplay EV sales accounted for less than 3% of the company's total sales of vehicles.