Ford Motor Co is spending US$1 billion to take over a budding robotics start-up to acquire more expertise needed to reach its ambitious goal of having a fully driverless vehicle on the road by 2021.
The big bet announced on Friday comes just a few months after the Pittsburgh-based start-up, Argo AI, was created by two alumni of Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics program, Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander.
The alliance between Argo and Ford is the latest to combine the spunk and dexterity of a technologically savvy start-up with the financial muscle and manufacturing know-how of a major automaker in the race to develop autonomous vehicles.
Last year rival General Motors Co paid US$581 million to buy Cruise Automation, a 40-person software company that is testing vehicles in San Francisco.
The Argo deal marks the next step in Ford’s journey toward building a vehicle without a steering wheel or brake pedal by 2021 — a vision that Ford chief executive officer Mark Fields laid out in summer last year.
The big-ticket deal for the newly minted company clearly was aimed at getting Salesky and Rande.
Salesky formerly worked on self-driving cars at a high-profile project within Google — now known as Waymo — and Rander did the same kind of engineering at ride-hailing service Uber Technologies Inc before the two men teamed up to launch Argo late last year.
“When talent like that comes up, you don’t ignore that ability,” said Raj Nair, who doubles as Ford’s chief technical officer and product development head.
The two are to develop the core technology of Ford’s autonomous vehicle — the “virtual driver” system, which Nair described as the car’s “brains, eyes, ears and senses.”
The decision to turn to Argo for help is a tacit acknowledgement that Ford needed more talent to deliver on Fields’ 2021 promise, said one expert familiar with Salesky and Rande.
“This is likely a realization that Ford is behind relative to companies like [General Motors Co] GM, Audi, [AB] Volvo, Waymo and Uber, and is trying to catch up,” said Raj Rajkumar, a Carnegie Mellon computer engineering professor who leads the school’s autonomous vehicle research.
Salesky said Argo expects to have 200 workers by the end of the year.
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