Ford: Plans to Launch Autonomous Vehicles in Texas by 2021

Ford Motors Co has made an announcement that it will roll out self-driving vehicles in Texas in 2021, Reuters reported. The announcement was made public on Wednesday.

The company will start the proceedings by this November mapping the streets of downtown Austin, the report said.

Until the launch of an autonomous taxi and delivery service at scale in the proposed year, the company will focus on the development of the geographic area and fleet. Initially, Miami and Washington were chosen to carry out the vehicle test. The company is using its hybrid Ford Fusion sedan, which is co-developed with Argo AI, a Pittsburgh-based startup for the testing of its self-driving system. Ford and Volkswagen havea majority stake in the startup.

There are autonomous sensors such as LIDAR, cameras,and relevant software inside the testing vehicles.Other than Ford, Waymo has introduced an automated ride service with human attendants in Phoenix in 2018.

Earlier, Austin was used as a testing ground by Google to test a pod-shaped Firefly, its self-driving prototype. Five years ago, the vehicle was driven by a blind man named Steve Mahan for a period of 10 minutes.