Ford's parallel PARCing: Motor giant tries to craft new tech just like Xerox

Ford sees the value of electric cars, particularly range extender hybrids, pointing out that a combination of stop-start and regen braking makes for a very green solution. While Jaguar recently told journalists that it would never see drivers as cargo, Ford has a different view. The vast majority of its cars are bought for transport rather than entertainment, and the self-driving car is coming soon.

In many ways it has already arrived. Cars already decide when to change gear for you – Rolls Royces and trucks even use GPS and maps of the road ahead to anticipate gear changes. We've had cruise control for decades and now have radar-assisted cruise control, which maintains a gap as well as a speed. Rain-sensing wipers decide when to wipe, automatic headlights when to illuminate. Cars will do the steering while you control the pedals to park.

We'll soon see cars that handle stop-start traffic for you, and completely control cars on motorways. What is a little way off, although perhaps only five years, is full control, where a car scans the three-dimensional environment, compares it with a map looking at weather, and plans the route. Ford expects to cope with the most extreme environments, such as New Delhi rush hour, by 2030.

Ford VP of Research and Advanced Engineering Ken Washington

It's something Ford has been working on for a while. The algorithm development was started in 2013, and used a Ford Fusion as a development vehicle, using a high-resolution, expensive lidar (laser radar). The initial work has been so promising that it's now coming out of the "discover" stage of research to the advanced engineering program of development. Ford's Ken Washington, VP of Research and Advanced Engineering, said "It's no longer 'is it possible,' we have answered that question." The self-driving Ford isn't yet attached to a vehicle program, that will come next with the final stage being "Go to market."

From the technology side, there are six ingredients: sensors, high performance local processing, algorithms, 3D mapping, connectivity, and vehicle integration. Perhaps more taxing is the environmental stuff. "What happens when you go from fun to drive to fun to ride," says Washington. He points out that we need to think about the effect of pedestrians: drivers are really good at judging driver intent. How would the pedestrian know that the driver isn't driving? How does an autonomous car judge what a pedestrian is about to do?

Genevieve Bell from Intel

The more interesting set of research topics is human issues. Intel's amazing anthropologist Genevieve Bell spends lots of time thinking about this space. She loves studying the interaction between people and machines. Furby can talk, Siri can talk and listen; these are objects that will have relationships with us. But it might be fun to get a Furby talking to an iPhone, sit back and listen. Bell wonders what happens if you sing in your car – will your on-board Siri reset the sat-nav? How much autonomy will you grant the car? What do you grant and what is its scope? Will we feel judged by our autonomous device? Indeed Jaguar wants the car to judge the driver, and is looking at systems that will monitor your alertness before ceding control back to you. "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can’t do that."

But not all the new technology going into cars is purely pragmatic. Ford is working with the glass company Corning to use its fiber optic cable as decoration. Corning has a product called Fibrance that is designed to radiate the light travelling down the fiber, giving a very bright, even light from a laser source. The fiber is thin enough and flexible enough to be used as stitching. Given that Ferrari will charge you hundreds of pounds to have yellow rather than black stitching, just think of what could be charged for a custom stitched logo on the headrests of the new Ford GT. It's a future much less scary than the one Ford Prefect encountered. ®