Ford says its Active Drive Assist system will allow hands-free driving on more than 100,000 miles of highways across the United States and Canada.
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Ford Motor followed Tesla in many ways when it came to the Mustang Mach-E, its new battery-powered electric vehicle, but CEO Jim Farley took to Twitter on Thursday to show that Ford doesn’t look like Tesla when it comes to technology testing without driver using customers like guinea pigs on public roads.
In a tweet about Ford’s future hands-free highway driving system, Farley said, “BlueCruise! We’ve tested it in the real world, so our customers don’t have to.”
The message was a blow to Tesla and CEO Elon Musk.
In October 2020, Tesla launched a beta, or unfinished, version of its premium driver assistance system, which the company sells as “Full Self-Driving” or FSD to customers.
Only some customers who purchase the FSD option have access to the beta version to try out the latest features that are added to the system before all errors are resolved. The company revealed that it had launched FSD beta to 2,000 drivers previously, but revoked access for several drivers who were allegedly not paying proper attention to the road.
In his latest Twitter update, Musk said on April 9 that Tesla is “Almost done with FSD Beta V9.0. The step change improvement is massive, especially for weird corner cases and bad weather. Pure vision, without radar “.
Despite its brand name, the FSD system is not able to control a Tesla vehicle under all normal driving conditions. Tesla told the California DMV late last year, according to records obtained by CNBC and others, that “neither autopilot nor FSD capability is an autonomous system.”
Tesla faces criticism for the US Full Self Driving brand name, and a German court has banned Tesla from using the terms Autopilot and Full Self-Driving in advertising because it overestimates the capabilities of a Tesla vehicle.
There have also been several accidents involving Teslas recently, leading to federal investigations that will determine whether the driver assistance technology contributed to or caused the collisions. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said last month that it had opened 27 investigations into Tesla vehicle accidents, of which 23 remain active, according to Reuters.
According to Ford, its BlueCruise system will be launched later this year on the 2021 Ford F-150 and 2021 Mustang Mach-E, after more than 500,000 miles of development testing and fine tuning.
The Ford system, like the General Motors Super Cruise, promises fewer capabilities than Tesla’s FSD system. But Ford will not ask drivers to “check in” by touching the steering wheel. Instead, a camera-based system inside the vehicle monitors the driver’s eyes and attention to the road.
The use of the Ford and GM systems is also limited to certain pre-mapped highways in the US and Canada. Tesla does not restrict the use of Autopilot and FSD or FSD beta in the same way.