What a difference a year makes. One year ago, at the same Techonomy conference in Half Moon Bay, the Ford CTO could not have been more dismissive of autonomous vehicles. He told me that they would not work and were decades away.
In January 2015, Ford opened a Silicon Valley development center. In November, he was back, and he brought this vehicle to the conference along with some engineers working on mobility services (think Uber) and automated driving.
Objects in mirror are currently larger than they appear: The cylinders on the roof are the new Velodyne LIDAR units. Ultimately, they should reside entirely in the side mirrors, along with the cameras. The pancake discs on the center of the roof are phase-array antenna for network connectivity.
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