PALO ALTO, Calif.–There has been some early discussion at a number of credit union meetings over how driverless cars may someday affect automobile ownership and the need to finance vehicles, but the timetable for such a transition has always been vague.
But if comments made by the president of Ford Motor Co. are any indication, the transition may occur more quickly than many expect.
At a news conference at Ford’s research center here, Ford CEO Mark Fields said the company plans to mass produce driverless cars and have them in commercial operation in a ride-hailing service by 2021. Moreover, Fields said the vehicles will be a dramatic departure from the cars on the road today.
Beyond that, Mr. Fields’s announcement was short on specifics. But he said that the vehicles Ford envisioned would be radically different from those that populate American roads now.
“That means there’s going to be no steering wheel. There’s going to be no gas pedal. There’s going to be no brake pedal,’’ Fields said.
Ford said it will be expanding its Palo Alto center to work on the vehicles, and has acquired a start-up that specializes in computer vision.
The Wall Street Journal cited a prediction from Brian Johnson, an analyst with Barclays, who forecast that once autonomous vehicles are in widespread use, auto sales could fall as much as 40% as people rely on such services for transportation and choose not to own cars.
Fields said the combination of driverless cars and ride-sharing services represent a “seismic shift.”
Ford is not alone. GM and Lyft plan to have driverless vehicles operating in tests within a year. Volvo also announced that it had entered into a $300-million agreement with Uber to co-develop autonomous sport-utility vehicles that will either be used as self-driving taxis or sold to consumers.
Much of the initial engineering will take place on a platform for an XC90 SUV that is capable of piloting itself. At some point, the two companies indicated Uber will take that technology and use it as the foundation to develop its own self-driving vehicle technology, and Volvo will do the same.